100 is the Loneliest Number
by AmandaFriend
Summary: Bonesology summer challenge: take 100 words, wrestle 100 stories from them, but the stories are no longer than 300 words each. This will be a romance, a drama, a bit o'fluff, a bit of angst. Many, if not most, of the Bones family will appear because they're needed to sort out this puzzle of a story.
1. Chapter 1

**Finger**

The remains came in a small cardboard box, far smaller than the box of Milk Duds he was munching on.

"Is that. . . ?"

"Yes," she confirmed. "The distal, intermediate, proximal, metacarpal. . . ."

"It's a **finger** ," he said. "All we've got is a finger."

"Yes."

"And you can identify a whole person just from this?"

The affirmative came out breathy as if she were exasperated at his question.

"I. . . I believe you," he said by way of apology.

She continued to work examining the bone every which way but Sunday and he continued chewing on the brilliance of the woman in the same way he was chewing on the Milk Dud.

Miss Warren, have. . .?"

He could barely get the question out—partly because of the caramelly goodness sticking to his teeth—when she surprised him.

"The _finger_ belonged to someone who was most certainly a pianist or typist, although I would. . . ," she paused looking up at him for the briefest moment before veering into the world of English he understood, "say that he is more than likely a pianist."

"More than likely," he repeated.

"Based on the size of the, uh, _finger_ , there is a high likelihood that the victim was male."

He found the certainty amusing and couldn't help but pose a question.

"Can you possibly tell me the height and weight of the male pianist?"

Yeah, he was being a smart ass, but he couldn't help it with the way she was picking details out of those 4 small bones.

"I cannot give you an accurate estimation of his weight, but I would say that his height would range from 5'10" to 6'4".

Special Agent Aubrey gave a low whistle.

"I'm sorry I couldn't be more accurate."

 **Author's Note:** This will be one of those long, long stories that I never seem to finish (yet I will), but thankfully, with much shorter chapters. Because short, unconnected stories don't appeal to me as a writer (and they can be hard to do well), I am going to make this into one big, happy (angsty, dramatic, funny) story, much in the same vein as _Songs in the Key of Life_. At some point, soon, I hope, the gambling story will be finished, I'll figure out where to take the shadow government story and this will be one of those free-flowing stories that isn't connected to anything in the show except for the characters being in character as best as one can do in 300-words. Enjoy!


	2. Bad

**Bad**

"Should I feel **bad** that this might just be a kidnapping and not a murder?"

He'd seen the squint squad in action on murders and he had to admit that he rather enjoyed watching the gears spin and the computer whirr and the brains light up as they cranked out detail after detail during any one of the dozen or so murder investigations he'd worked on with them. But a kidnapping? Beyond Angela's killer computer chops, he wasn't entirely sure the others could offer up much more than Jennifer Warren's impressive identification from the finger.

Stark gave him the eye—the boss' evil eye—that he had already figured out meant that he had crossed a line and said something incredibly stupid or crass or any of a dozen other possibilities.

"Agent Aubrey, we want to bring the guy home," Stark drawled. "Alive, _if this is a kidnapping_. But first things first."

He made a curt nod—he couldn't argue with that—tried to make up for his miscue. "The squint's are trying to date the bone, make sure it's of recent vintage." He continued talking, recapping everything they had so far, partly to assure Stark he was going to be an asset, and partly to reassure himself he had all the details. ". . . And we're checking missing persons for any stray piano players, but nothing yet."

Stark rubbed the area above his left brow. "There's a cultural exchange going on at the Jeffersonian this week. Art, dance, that kind of thing. Dr. Saroyan is meeting with some international scientists." He had that faraway look in his eye. "Check on them."

"Sir?"

A hard look. "We have a finger and nothing else." He pointed toward the door. "Go. You're on scientist duty this week."


	3. Intelligence

**Intelligence**

He didn't much care what political upheaval had caused his successor to take off half a country away to take a job somewhere out in the heartland. He could navigate the politics of a place like the Jeffersonian just fine, thank you very much.

After what he'd been through, he could navigate just about anything.

His resume was still impressive, still enough to get him in most doors. He'd done more than those rinky dink consulting jobs over the years to earn a place here. A few jobs for State, that ongoing hell in Iraq for the military. But it took only one **intelligence** fiasco to solidify his place on the candidates' list.

And once in the door, he wasn't going to leave.

Never mind that he hadn't published in years or that he had barely any money to buy a pair of new shoes. The blue suit, the one that played well in court, still had some mileage left in it and he had people skills that the woman he was replacing did not possess.

He could do this.

She was leaving behind a 97% solve rate and a matching conviction rate and all he had to do was hold on until he got his legs underneath him. State-of-the-art lab, top-of-the-line team—hell, he was landing in the Jeffersonian Medico-Legal Lab instead of some slag heap in West Virginia or another dung hill in Baghdad.

He could be on top again.

Sailing through the vetting process had been far too easy, a nod to the CIA wonk that owed him, so what did he have to complain about?

He impressed the boss, one Dr. Camille Saroyan, and it wouldn't take long before he had the rest of the team charmed.

Or his name wasn't Dr. Michael Stires.


	4. Announce

**Announce**

In the background of the Skype call she could hear a baby's cry.

"You need to get that, Sweetie?" Her friend disappeared from the screen leaving behind a picture of the moving boxes that still littered the home. Despite never having visited this new house in Michigan, she knew just how many steps it took to retrieve the child, and return.

They'd done this a few times already.

Her friend reappeared with a baby in her arms, a little boy with only a whisper of hair and a face that looked like he was still on the edge of a storm. But the woman on the other side of the world adjusted her blouse and set her son to suckling on her breast before turning back to the screen.

"Ooooh," she cooed, "I remember when Michael Vincent was like that."

"Booth and Christine are both calling him Tiger, now," her friend complained, a finger tracing the roundness of his face. "And Christine is insisting that we call her Princess."

"Well, Sweetie, if that's the only trouble you've got. . . ." Her friend adjusted her arms and she caught the contented look on the baby's face, the look of pure bliss that she remembered from the time her own son was nursing.

"Have you and Hodgins started trying?"

She smiled. "That's one of the reasons we ended up in Paris. The Louvre, lovemaking and leaving death behind."

"And avoiding my replacement."

She couldn't but help catch the wistfulness in her friend's voice. "Well, Cam's been emailing us and I've been trashing them. Last one had in the subject line that she had something to **announce** the moment we got back." She took a deep breath. "So, yeah, Sweetie."

"But whoever it is, it isn't you."


	5. Day

**Day**

Just a time zone away from D.C., and he was in a whole different world.

". . . The next **day** we interrogated the suspect." Without missing a step, he took up the thread from Bones and began to outline the line of questions he chose to elicit more details from FitzGerald.

Granted, this move had all the appearances of being temporary—a rented house, a year's contract—but the powers-that-be at the university were very interested in bringing them back for a longer term and he was rather enjoying his new role as college professor.

". . . But we couldn't go forward with an arrest until we had corroborating forensic evidence."

Bones took up the story accompanied by a visual stew of osteopapadopoluses and hemothorodops on the screen behind them and a look at the graduate students in the auditorium told him all he needed—they had a rapt audience.

". . . The forensic team at the Jeffersonian was able to determine that the blows were sustained. . . ."

They were good at this tag team teaching—Marrying Forensic Science and Criminal Investigations or some such title—but the trip down murder lane had reminded them both of all the good work they'd done over the years.

And all the good work they could do by teaching others.

"Are there any questions for former Special Agent Booth or myself?"

Hands shot up and he watched as Bones fielded the first of a dozen or more questions.

This was the closest they got to murder. He and Bones had regular hours, Christine had a great school, Tiger had plenty of mom-time and dad-time and the best part of all—he was miles away from the smell of decomposition.

Hell, he might get used to this.


	6. Murder

**Murder**

Was this really **murder**? Or was it a cleansing of sorts, a means to reset the cosmic balance sheet? Atonement? God demanding man to be made free of his imperfections and man bending to that decree?

Or was it going to be madness? Voices in the head commanding each action? A build-up of childhood traumas manifesting themselves into horrific killings as a means of playing out ?

Or passion? Greed? Lust? Fear? Pride? Or that old cliche, Love?

Or was this going to be revenge? Payback on the scale that seemed only possible in big budget movies or low budget psyches?

No, he thought, as he separated the bones of the foot from the flesh. He'd memorized this part, memorized each bone and its corresponding musculature. No mean feat given that the foot contained 26 bones, 33 joints and 100 muscles, tendons and ligaments. But to skin a foot and leave only the meaty part?

Much harder than those finger bones.

He wanted to laugh. Why hadn't someone thought of this before? Sending a finger to the Jeffersonian with the flesh intact was tantamount to giving up; any fool could match up fingerprints and the game would be up.

But a foot? Sans bones?

With a bit of finagling, another metacarpal was released from its fleshy prison and he felt with his gloved hand for the rest of the bones.

"Cuboid, navicular. . . ," he ticked off each bone he'd already removed and made a mental note of the ones remaining.

No. He'd considered a hundred different scenarios, a hundred different reasons, had even read the Bible to see if something ancient might give him something new under this sun, but all of his research only drew him back to the one true reason for doing this.

Genius.


	7. Sad

**Sad**

Usually she gave little thought to the architecture of the Medico-Legal Lab, but today she thought of it only as a tomb of glass and steel.

That's why she was in her office staring at a painting she had begun before setting off for a month-long vacation in Paris with her family. Staring at the painting without seeing it.

But seeing a whole different image unfolding before her.

"Angela?"

Cam had taken up position just outside her office door and if she had anything to say about it, the woman would never, _ever_ enter her office again.

"I wish you would have stayed for my explanation," Cam said, then sighed. "We had the best forensic anthropologist and I thought that we would do well with the man who taught her."

"You mean the bastard who taught her." She wasn't going to give any ground. "Did you even talk to Brennan about her replacement?"

For a woman who didn't believe in stupid questions, she found the one exception as Cam's body language gave away the answer.

She then gave one of her own.

"Two weeks."

"Two weeks?"

"Two weeks," she repeated. "Two weeks to find my replacement."

"Angela. . . ."

"I can't work for a man who screwed Brennan and then screwed her over." Anger fueled her now. "You know what is so **sad** about this? You could have had Daisy, one of _Brennan's_ students. Or you could have waited on that Cuban Romeo, or Arastoo, or Wendell. Clark could have held down the lab a little longer. I can't believe _he_ was your only choice."

If Cam had something to say, she wasn't going to hear it. She turned back to the painting and began painting furiously, the equivalent of slamming the door in her bosses' face.


	8. Plan

**Plan**

Warren's report on the finger was thorough; Tempe had taught her well. But this foot? He offered up his only insight. "The monks of Varansi in India are said to wear the flesh of others as a means of finding enlightenment."

He caught the eye of Dr. Hodgins who paused in collecting particulates.

"If we were in India, that might be relevant."

Two weeks, he thought, then he and his wife were gone. But the genius little intern reminded him that some of them would be staying on.

"There's no evidence that the Aghori actually wear the flesh. They do, however, drink from skulls and eat the heads off of live animals."

He couldn't help but catch the look between Warren and Hodgins. "I stand corrected," he said. In the past he might bed someone like her, but he wasn't sure how given how tense the situation was. "You've done a fine job on your report on that phalange. Quite complete."

He tried his smile, but Warren wasn't drawn in.

"She had an excellent teacher."

Hodgins was a pit bull—loyal to the end. He turned back to the foot Dr. Saroyan was slicing.

"DNA will tell us if the finger and the foot are from the same victim," she said. She handed the covered Petri dish to Warren. "Dr. Hodgins, could you. . . ?" She head

checked him.

"Right away."

"Miss Warren?" she gave her a long look.

"You want me to find something to do." The young thing flashed a dazzling smile and followed Hodgins from the platform.

As they disappeared, she addressed him. "I wish you would find some middle ground with Hodgins and Angela."

"You really think that's possible?"

Her look gave him his answer.

"This really wasn't my **plan** for the lab."


	9. Ill

**Ill**

With that one look he knew something was terribly wrong.

"Is Tiger **ill**? Christine?"

It was that "little girl lost" look, a look he hadn't seen for a very long time and he felt a sense of panic.

"Is it Max? Russ? One of the girls?"

She shook her head. "Angela's quitting."

He relaxed a little. "We kind of knew that was going to happen, Bones. Paris is a hell of a lot better than dead bodies."

But the look didn't change. "They hired someone to replace me."

His replacement had been relatively easy, and despite a twinge of regret, pretty painless. Apparently not for Bones.

"What'd they do? Hire the Canadian foot guy? Or that Cuban? Ange could deal with him if he hit on her."

"Michael Stires."

It took him almost a minute to remember the guy, but when he did, he understood. He had his own pang of guilt for his part in blindsiding her, but it had been that prick Stires who'd done his best to discredit her by making the attack both professional and personal.

"Bones, you knew they'd have to hire someone eventually." But the rational wasn't soothing enough.

"He hasn't published in years, Booth. He's been overseas because . . . ."

It wasn't like her to stop in the middle of a sentence like that, but emotion was overwhelming her.

He understood. "You're upset because they hired someone who isn't even half as good as you are, Bones. Cam could have hired Daisy or one of the other interns you trained—weren't they all racing to finish their doctorates—but she chose someone who you can't respect for the job that you made one of the most respected in the country."

But his words were only a band-aid on her pain.


	10. Secret

**Secret**

A message.

He was practically giddy with the thought of them seeing his handiwork, the carving crowning the ribs, wrapping around in a message that only they could read.

He laughed. It had taken him hours to deflesh the body, hours to sketch the perfect design. Then draw it on the ribs and rehearse the cuts before making the very first mark on the pristine white of the bones.

And it was done.

Running his gloved fingers over the lines he'd carved, he felt how they ran around and around and through, cutting against each other in a pattern that was purely brilliant. A continuous line that wove through each other joining up then parting only to join again.

His message.

Only a few would be able to read it; only a few would be able to really understand the significance of what he was doing.

But they would.

They would know and they would rejoice.

He admired his handiwork for a moment longer before settling the bones into the box. Years in the soil, the box offered up another clue for them to decipher, another clue in the game he had devised.

The box really was a stroke of pure. . . should he say it? He laughed again. _Pure genius._

The wooden box inside another, inside another—the proper way to package something this delicate—each box another clue to be decoded. He affixed the label—mucilage and an old rag paper.

That was the secret to this all, wasn't it? Everything a riddle, a test of their abilities.

He hoped they would be worthy of the game, because he really wasn't willing to work with second best.


	11. Behind

**Behind**

"You just might want to put on your big boy pants for this."

That ended the complaints almost immediately. It wasn't that Caroline Julian was unsympathetic—hell, she practically cried when she heard that her favorite FBI agent his top squint were heading off into the sunset. But ten minutes of complaining about the newest squint was exactly ten minutes too much.

"All I asked is if Dr. Saroyan was in her office."

Dr. Hodgins stared back at her with those blue eyes that reminded her of the other blue-eyed wonder that was no longer in the lab. Within a few days, the Jeffersonian would be without two more of its finest and she wasn't sure if the lab would ever be the same.

"She's in there. With _him_."

"Now you just listen to me." She had a few tricks up her sleeves, but the truth—something she had been trying to uncover since she heard about the newest hire—was always best. Especially now. "Dr. Camille Saroyan gave the Jeffersonian's board exactly what they wanted: three names and her recommendation. Was it her fault that they came back with a fourth name and told her he was her newest forensic anthropologist?"

She could practically hear the gears grinding away on that bit of information. "Someone in the government thought it was important for the Jeffersonian to hire someone of Dr. Brennan's stature or expertise and since they couldn't very well pull a star from the heavens, they settled for someone they owed a big fat favor to."

The man blinked.

"Do we know who's **behind** this?"

"I don't know what you are talking about," she lied, "and I will deny I ever said anything to you."

"But whoever did this has a hell of a lot of pull."


	12. Want

**Want**

The bones on the examination table practically screamed for attention. And why not? Human ribs buried in a small toe-pincher coffin, a band of some kind of writing carved into the bones. Despite its gristliness, the mystery grew more intriguing with each new

He found himself drawn in, the bones laid out on the table with a precision that mirrored how they were packaged and sent to the Jeffersonian. The wooden coffin sat on its own table still steeped in insect-rich soil, a burial cloth nearby.

Cam was directing traffic as Stires looked on. "There's lots for you, Dr. Hodgins. Dirt, insects, particulates and that box and the cloth. You and Angela have this?"

He nodded and glanced at his wife. Despite the digital Nikon at the ready, she was simply staring at the ribs. "Ange?"

It took her a second, but she made a suggestion. "You should check to see if the bones were aged using a tea solution. And the cloth is probably silk."

"That's a good idea," he said as he peered at the bones. "Tea has tannin." The markings on the bones had been highlighted by a brown staining.

"If you don't mind, Miss Montenegro," Stires said, his manner unerringly polite, "I **want** a complete set of photos of these markings for identi. . . ."

"They were probably made by a Dremel tool with carving attachments and if you examine the markings, they are probably ambigrams although they may not be in English."

That stopped everyone. Angela's face, normally pale, looked extraordinarily bloodless. "Angie?" He stepped forward toward his wife. "Are you okay?"

That wasn't Cam's question. "What do you know about this, Angela?"

But the artist gave no reply, but simply turned from the bones and retreated from the platform.


	13. Stranded

**Stranded**

He felt the pressure of the investigation—a potential serial killer playing with them and with body parts and he wasn't even sure if there were murders here or if someone were simply robbing graves and hospital refuse for the little gifts that seemed to be popping up in the strangest of places before making their way to the FBI and the Jeffersonian.

And it wasn't helping that the experts weren't agreeing on anything that helped him.

"One FBI profiler says that these are three separate cases." Aubrey paused in eating his donut. "But two others say this is definitely the work of a serial killer who thinks he has a relationship with the Jeffersonian."

Caroline Julian huffed. "Any chance the first one is right and we just have a looney toon scattering body parts all over the city?"

He set the photos on the desk. Finger bones delivered to the FBI, then a fleshy foot found on the grounds of the Jeffersonian followed by a rib cage addressed to the Medico-Legal Lab. Shaking his head, he set down the donut. "According to the squints, each comes from a different victim."

"Last one had a message inscribed on the ribs that apparently Angela recognized from some artwork she'd seen while she was in college."

"I'd hate to think what kinds of assignments her professors were coming up with." The prosecutor paused. "You up to this?" She was raising an eyebrow and he knew exactly what she was asking. "

"Doesn't help that the reigning expert investigator on serial killers is **stranded** in the wilds of academia, but I think I'm up to it."

"Well, good," she said, handing him another file. "There seems to be another body part left behind at the dinosaur exhibit at the museum."


	14. Wealthy

**Wealthy**

She hugged herself, shivering against icy fear.

"Angela?'

His voice was soothing, but she took no comfort from it.

She broke. "We're **wealthy** , Hodgins. We can just take off for anywhere in the world. Why stay here? Why don't we. . . ?"

Her rant continued as her husband pulled her into his arms.

"Just tell me, Angie. It's okay. Just tell me what you know about this." His voice was low and gentle. "Just take a deep breath and calm down. It's going to be all right."

His voice, low and rhythmic, mirrored the same tone he used with Michael Vincent when their son fell and skinned his knee when he tried to ride his trike down four steps at the park. But this was far worse than a skinned knee.

"I can't," she sobbed into his lab coat. "I can't. I just can't."

But he held her and tried to calm her and within minutes she began to believe that maybe Hodgins could hold back the evil.

So, she began. She seemed to be telling the tale mostly to the blue of his lab coat, sometimes needed to retrace her words when they became hopelessly muffled in the cloth, but within minutes she had given up the story as best she could remember it.

"It should be easy to find someone like that." Her husband's voice had never strayed from the calm tone despite the horror of the tale she told. "We'll give Aubrey a description of this guy and his name and they'll find this guy."

"But what if. . . ?" The question was far too horrible to finish.

"I'll hire an army to protect us, Ange."

It took several more minutes, but she repeated his name for the first time in 20 years.


	15. Marriage

**Marriage**

The heads up had come from Dr. Saroyan, and he could see why. Angela practically quaked with dread.

He kept his voice low and even. "Just start from the beginning."

Hodgins had her hand in his, a perfect **marriage** of his strength to her fear.

"We don't even know if it's him." Her voice, tremulous and high, was edged with horror. "This is just so, so. . . ."

He leaned in as he had seen Booth do with suspects, leaned in and took her free hand in his. A glance at Hodgins told him that the man wouldn't ever let go of his wife, that he appreciated the connection.

He leveled his eyes with hers. "Angela, just tell me a little about this guy. If it gets to be too much. . . ."

"I'll stop you, Aubrey."

Hodgin's concern really wasn't his. The name alone was only one piece of the puzzle; he already had agents looking into him. He was afraid that Angela might just shake apart before she could give him anything else that was useful.

"He. . . he was clever and so far ahead of anyone else with his vision of art." The words came out like a string that she was afraid would break if she thought too hard about it. "But something happened and he began to bring in dead things and. . . ."

The words run out of her quickly and he tried to keep up as she told him of a young man sinking into mental illness before finally being expelled from art school and then disappearing into the 1990s.

"We need to know why he came back, why he's decided to target the Jeffersonian."

Angela wasn't tricked by his words. "You mean, why he's targeting me."


	16. Affected

**Affected**

" _Is it this? What we do? Is it eating away at all of us?"_

The words reverberated in his mind as he watched Angela sleep, her arms loosely holding onto Michael Vincent in their bed, a half-empty bottle of wine on the nightstand.

It would take more than just a couple glasses of wine to help him find rest.

So far the particulate evidence and the other pieces of the puzzle gave them almost nothing to help them figure out anything on where the ribs had been buried or where they'd been beyond several dozen sites within a 200 mile radius of D.C.

"Maybe we should have just done what Brennan and Booth did," he said to the sleeping form of his wife and child, "find a nice little college town to start fresh. Or we should have just gone to Paris."

Angela looked so peaceful in sleep, so free of the worries that were haunting her during the day.

He heard a creak in the hallway, but he couldn't chance it being something more and he unfolded himself from the chair and padded softly toward the sound, a baseball bat in hand.

He checked his breathing, checked the hallway, flooding the area with light as he raised the bat high.

Nothing.

They'd seen too much over the years not to be **affected** by the possibility of a madman focused on them. Hadn't Christopher Pelant made them a target? Hadn't he altered the fabric of their lives?

He'd buy tickets for Paris tomorrow, say good-bye to the lab and take off to escape the fear, if nothing else. Cam would just have to understand.

Until then, he would do what he had to do to protect his family.


	17. Long Hours

**Long Hours**

"Hey, Cam."

The voice at the other line was so comforting.

"Seeley."

She remembered to ask after the family and the job and the new house when Booth filled in a silence.

"What's wrong?" His voice had a slight touch of humor to it. "Aubrey not playing nicely?"

"No," she said, answering quickly. Aubrey had been supportive, even offering to put in the **long hours** to keep Angela safe. "No. He's great."

She tried to steer the conversation back to safer ground, but her effort fell flat.

"Okay, Cam, why'd you really call? Need Bones or me to convince Hodgins and Angela to stay?"

"Look, I shouldn't have bothered you. . . ."

A muffled cry reminded her that he wasn't alone.

"Stay on the line, Cam," Booth insisted. "My little man just needs his food."

She held on, listening to the silence, wondering for the hundredth time if this was a good idea. Booth didn't give her much of a chance as he quickly came back on the line.

"I've got you on speaker, Cam. This little guy needs two hands." He grunted and she imagined him shifting the newest Booth into a more comfortable position. "What's really going on, Cam?"

"Is Brennan there?"

Another grunt. "No. She's got some kind of department meeting tonight." She heard a bit of cooing and she wondered if it was Booth or the littlest Booth. "Is this something for Bones?"

She took a deep breath and dove in. Outlined the case. Avoided mentioning Angela's connection.

"Bones will need everything. X-rays, photos, the works."

"I've even got casts of the bones for her."

Neither of them mentioned Stires, but she knew the next bit was a dig at Bones' former mentor.

"Overnight it to us," he said. "Bones will find something."


	18. Worthy

**Worthy**

He was half past hungry and no closer to an answer.

Well, _several answers_ , he thought, as he broke out his supply of Milk Duds.

First, the creepazoid who _might be_ terrorizing Angela. Hospitalized until a snafu allowed him to go free and clear out of the picture. To his mind, that never really boded well. Second, Angela's school mates. A bit harder to trace given that 20-year-old records could be as holey as Swiss cheese.

 _Swiss cheese_ , he thought as his stomach grumbled interest. What he wouldn't give for a nice ham and Swiss on toasted rye with a hint of. . . . No, back to the case.

He popped another Milk Dud into his mouth and allowed waxy chocolate to meld with gooey caramel. It would have to do.

Despite a protest from his stomach, he scanned the rosters again. Agents were trying to track down everybody, but twenty years was its own kind of hurdle. But any agent **worthy** of taking over Special Agent Seeley Booth's job had to cover everything.

And yet he felt like he was missing something.

 _It all went back to that damned writing on the bones,_ he thought _._ They had age, sex and race for the body parts, but the carving on the ribs was anything but obvious. He picked up the photo and another Milk Dud and found neither one satisfying. The language experts at the Jeffersonian said it wasn't any language they knew. Stires gave him a theory—some psycho with access to cadavers pulling a prank.

 _But pranks shouldn't terrorize people like this._

The bedroom light blinked out and the Hodgins' house was bathed in a halo of security lights.

He hunkered down and reached for his Thermos of coffee. It would be a long night.


	19. Sinful

**Sinful**

He felt slightly **sinful** in this lie to his wife, but he had more than a sneaking suspicion it just couldn't be helped. Cam had practically scrubbed anything in the report that suggested it originated at the Jeffersonian, and he just wanted Bones to look at the information as objectively as possible.

But a lie was still a lie.

Months after his gambling relapse and he was just trying to maintain her trust.

Still a lie. . . .

"They seemed to have missed several small nicks on the bone surface here and," she pivoted the rib in her gloved hand, "here."

"Maybe it was just in the casting."

"Perhaps." She did not sound convinced and she sure as hell wasn't impressed with the report. She was nitpicking with a kind of regularity that made him wonder what kind of second-rate forensic anthropologist Cam had been saddled with in _Professor Stires._ . . .

"You said the bones showed signs of cancer." He _did_ listen, although he wasn't going to try the tongue-twister she rattled off.

"Yes," she said, although she seemed to be focusing on the carving. She repeated the cancer, repeated that she would much rather be inspecting the real bones.

"Well, consider this a dress rehearsal for us becoming consultants." A pile of finals were screaming for him to grade them, but he's much rather figure out this mystery. Maybe with time the pull of a case would lessen and. . . .

""I don't know that this is murder, Booth," she said as she stepped back from the autopsy table, "but I do know what this carving is."

He brightened. "That's good news, right?"

She gave him a slight nod. "I just don't understand why Cam wouldn't have just sent these directly to me."


	20. Obvious

**Obvious**

He stared at the results, at the _corrections_ on his original report and knew exactly who made them.

It's **obvious**.

"We often submit reports to other forensic anthropologists as a means. . . ." 

It's not a game he wanted to play. "You submitted the report to Tempe."

He's been in war zones where those guarding him might very well have been the same people who slit the throats of the victims he was examining. As far as he's concerned, the Jeffersonian was merely another war zone.

He schooled his voice, schooled his features to maintain the kind of neutrality he needed to survive.

"We're here to solve cases," he said. She was easy enough to read; her shoulders relaxed although she maintained that defensiveness—arms crossed at the waist. "And I can learn a great deal from someone who came before me. Isn't that how it's supposed to work?"

He smiled and shrugged slightly, a gesture of giving in to the inevitable.

"It's good to see that Tempe isn't so burned out with the work that she can't make a contribution."

Years of surviving everything from universities to killing grounds had taught him the power of choosing his words.

"I understand that you don't know me and you don't know what I am capable of doing. So you went to someone who you're familiar with."

Whatever tension remained had been neutralized with his words.

"I have to tell you, Dr. Stires, I am so glad to hear you say that." The woman practically bubbled. "I was so worried you would feel offended by taking the report outside the Jeffersonian. But I do appreciate your professionalism."

He watched her go and wondered how long it would take him to find a way to have her replaced.


	21. Caught

**Caught**

The beauty of art that veered from the traditional, he thought as he drove the van closer to his destination, was that one could capture the essence of the thing in any number of ways within a framework that could eschew the traditional forms of media for those that really spoke to the soul of the subject. And to capture the essence, one had to document all the senses, address all the modes of sensation. Hadn't the native peoples found soul within the natural world? Hadn't others tried to soak their canvasses in the very lifeblood of their subjects?

Behind him, he heard the muffled whimpering that leaked from deep within the canvas bag.

This was his calling: the ultimate portrait of suffering.

He checked the rearview mirror, checked the open box that housed the bag that held the canvas on which he would create his masterpiece.

"I need you to feel the emotions," he murmured to the bag. "I need you to feel everything."

His other attempts—the finger bones, the foot, the ribs—had prepared him for this. In them he had caught small twinges of regret.

It had been his highest hope, to create portraits of the human condition to rival the recognized masters, but he feared his first works had not been received with the same kind of investment he had made in them.

"It's just a few more miles," he said to the bag that had gone still before the contortions began again. "A few more things I have to do."

For a moment, he imagined what she would see in this newest image, if she would feel the emotion he was trying to portray.

"It's getting closer," he said, then glanced at the canvas bag. "No. How rude of me. We're getting closer."


	22. Splatter

**Splatter**

When she saw the canvas, she screamed.

"Oh, God," Cam said beside her, "it's like a bloody Shroud of Turin."

An image had been cast in shades of rust that feathered out to kind of **splatter** pattern—a portrait of a woman, her mouth opened in a silent scream, her eyes two dark splotches that only added to the horror.

"Is that. . . ?"

Had she been able to finish, she might have asked if anyone thought the work had been done in blood. Whatever it was that had soaked the canvas through to the other side.

In the portrait, all she saw was a death mask.

She could hear her breath, rough and strained, could feel only anguish as she recognized that same Cyrillic script along the edges of the canvas.

"What's it say?" she demanded. "What did he write now?"

Someone embraced her—held her up—as her knees gave way and she felt the only thing holding her together was fear.

"Ange," the voice came at her from far away and yet she knew that Hodgins was the one supporting her, "we'll figure out what it says. He's given us more information. We'll get him."

Wendell was manning the camera, shooting the script that edged the canvas. "We should get this translated right away. The last message read, 'Art is the expression of our greater selves, our purest intentions.'"

"There's nothing pure about this," Stires added. "Miss Montenegro, could you try to match what we have of the face to missing persons, perhaps?"

Every fiber of her being screamed, "No!", but she pulled away from her husband and tried to channel the strength of her best friend.

"Yeah, sure," she said as she took the camera from Wendell. "Anything to find this bastard."


	23. Flight

**Flight**

Sometimes Cam thought of it as the 5-o'clock **flight**.

As the time wound down, she could see the restlessness, feel the change in intensity within the lab. Techs would begin to check the clock in the same way they monitored their tests, interns would work faster, but still as deliberate. Then as the time ticked down, little groups of people would pop up from their stations to head for the doors.

But not tonight.

Surprisingly, the lab still teemed with workers who all seemed to have disregarded time. When she asked one of the techs working on a blood smear for the Jessop crime scene, the mystery only deepened.

"Dr. Stires?"

She found the man in the Bone Room reading through a report delivered from one of the techs who had stayed well beyond her appointed time. When he looked up from his reading, he thanked the tech by name before turning toward her.

"You told some of the techs to stay to work on the Jessop case?" 

He gave her that benign smile of his. "I simply asked them to stay to finish up their various analyses so that we could devote more time and resources to our Mad Artist."

"You can't authorize. . . ."

He cut her off. "I simply asked, said this wasn't overtime, just a nod toward their efforts on the next performance review." He held up his hand in surrender. "That's all."

"You should have consulted me."

Another surrender. "I will next time," he said. "But it benefits everyone to have the best people working the Mad Artist case."

"People working longer, no cost to the lab," he shrugged, "I thought it would be a win-win."

 _Maybe,_ she thought, as she left the room. _But why didn't she feel like a winner?_


	24. Slip

**Slip**

He was pretty cute sitting at his desk, a ham sandwich at half-staff as he read through a file. When the sandwich finally made its way to his mouth, she knew it was a good time and strolled into the room.

"Hey, Superman. I'd like to report a crime," she teased as she leaned in. "This guy I've been seeing is spending more time with the riff-raff than with me."

He smiled— _oh, that smile_ —and her heart flipped a little. "You ready for dinner?"

"Yeah," he stood and began to neaten the files crowding his desk. "But it's going to be a short night, Jessica."

"But we just closed the Jessop case." She couldn't hide the disappointment in her voice. "Even Superman got a night off."

"Yeah, well, we've still got that crazed artist guy and we can't say for certain if he's a murderer or a psycho thief and he's freaking out Angela and Hodgins. . . ."

"I get it," she said. "Duty calls." She tried to make light of it. "Superman had that super hearing and it had to mess with his quiet times." Her finger played against the edge of his desk. "I don't understand why Curly and Angela don't just take off for Paris and escape the weirdness."

He cocked his head. "They're a bit angry that they're being targeted." He grabbed his coat. "Figure that they're going to be needed if we're going to get this guy."

"And they were pretty terrific on this Jessop case. Nailed the guy to the wall."

"How about this?" she offered. "While we're waiting for the Mad Artist to make some kind of **slip** , why don't I help tonight?"

He hesitated, but she used his Kryptonite.

"I'll be Lois Lane," she said, "and bring the food."


	25. Escape

**Escape**

He knew a thing about torture, but the faculty get-together in which he had finally engineered an **escape** —"Our little man's got a cold"—had pushed torture to a whole different level.

"That was. . . (he tried to find the right adjective) _fun_ ," he announced as he turned the car onto the street.

"You enjoyed that?" Bones asked.

"I don't think anyone enjoys things like that," he countered. "Is there some anthropological reason for that kind of thing? Some Darwinian need for the survival of the dullest?"

If he thought he was going to have a conversation with his wife about the party they had just left, he was mistaken. Bones had already pulled out her phone and was dialing, a frown telling him exactly whom she was calling.

"Angela?"

"Yes," she sighed. "I've left her voicemails and several emails." Her voice trailed off. She sighed again.

"They probably have a case," he offered. "On top of that weird rib thing. Then they've got to pack for Paris and. . . ."

He kept talking, filling the car with speculation. The mistress of cold, hard evidence didn't stop him, even as his ideas became wishful.

". . .And you know Angela. She's probably deep into one of her paintings and can't remember what day it is."

"Maybe," she said.

She'd spoken mostly to the window, but he heard it just the same.

"Who is the one who's always talking about evidence?" He felt it was shaky ground, but he'd step on it to make her feel better. "She's got to be busy, training someone new."

She sighed. "I know you're right."

He'd call half the FBI tomorrow if he had to. He wasn't going to let his wife go through any more silent torture like this.


	26. Honor

**Honor**

All the while he was on the phone he felt the same kind of sensations that accompanied his chemo and he wondered if that was punishment for the lie he just told.

"You okay?"

Even though they were the only ones there, the lounge had suddenly become crowded when Fisher appeared. He hesitated. "No. No, I'm not okay." He stared at the screen of his phone gone black and wondered if he should just call his friend back and tell him the truth. "I'm not okay. This isn't okay." He looked up at Hodgins. "I understand that we're lying to Booth and Brennan so that they don't worry and they don't come running back here to just end up knee-deep in murder and mayhem, but this just doesn't feel right. I think they'd like to know the truth."

"They're our friends and they ought to know."

Now Fisher hesitated. "Are you sure they should have the news that _may be_ bad as in this psycho artist guy is _possibly_ stalking Angela with body parts as presents?" Fisher's delivered his verdict in the same droll tone in which he delivered cause of death. "Look, having a friend who drops everything for you is pretty special, but you said it was important to **honor** our promise to Angela."

He still wasn't sure. Something just didn't feel right lying to Booth and by extension, Brennan.

"I know them," he said. "They aren't going to like it if something happens and we're all lying because Angela asked us to."

"And what if this is just like the boy who cried wolf?" Fisher tested the cup of coffee he had come for, and pronounced the final word on the subject, "The bigger lie is calling this stuff coffee."


	27. Ashamed

**Ashamed**

Something was wrong.

His gut screamed it as he listened to the latest news from out East: _"We're fine. Everyone's fine. Just busy. Probably why she hasn't called."_

If he had been in the interrogation room with those people, he would have known they were lying the moment he heard their voices on the phone.

" _I'm fine. Michelle's fine."_

" _Bones has been trying to reach Angela and she's been a bit worried that she hasn't returned her messages."_

" _Everything's fine."_

" _What's going on, Cam?"_

" _Everyone's busy." She took a deep breath. "You know how it is when you've got a murder investigation."_

" _Look if you've changed your mind about Stires, Bones made her peace with that. There's nothing to be_ _ **ashamed**_ _about changing your mind, but if you ask me. . . ."_

" _Stires isn't. . . he isn't so bad. A lot of people here like him. . . Angela and Hodgins are busy working the case and getting their affairs in order for the big move. . . ."_

All the words were right as if they had all rehearsed them: Cam, Wendell, Aubrey, even Caroline had given him her version of the same lie.

" _Cher, I don't poke my nose into squinty business because you'd need a translator to figure it all out and who's got time for that?"_

Time? Hell, Bones and Angela had been on the phone constantly during the Michigan move. They talked two, three times a week since the move. And now?

He left a message on Angela's voicemail, a friendly reminder that she should let her best friend know she was okay. All right, so it was less-than-friendly.

Only later did he realize he should have gone with his gut and taken the first red-eye to Washington.


	28. Attentive

**Attentive**

 _A masterpiece required that the artist be. . ._ _ **attentive**_ _to all the minute details. A plan to begin, but once the tools and media were in hand. . . ah, the piece comes to life and must speak to what it should become._

 _What might she become in the piece he was constructing? At first he had thought her to be best suited for the defining element, the one that drew in the eyes and forced one to look before exploring the rest of the work, but her silence, her lack of contact. . . . Perhaps she would be better suited to another part of the work, another aspect that was crucial?_

 _Perhaps._

 _Long and lean physique, raven hair, dark eyes, pale skin. A marriage of physical beauty and intelligence. Was Fibonacci aware of such a specimen? Had others ever captured such an essence?_

He stood over her prone form, examined his latest prize with the practiced eye of an artist. _She was more than the others, more than just a few bones or flesh or even the suggestion of terror. No._

 _She could be his greatest creation._

He lifted her gently from the van and placed her on the cart just outside the door. Wrapping a blanket around her, he tried to protect her from the chill of the night. Then the slow descent into his studio.

 _I'll need time,_ he thought, as he steered the cart deep into his home. _Time to do this in a way that will seal my legacy._


	29. Motivated

**Motivated**

"What the hell **motivated** them to come up here?"

She felt at the mercy of the FBI agents swarming the rooftop of the Jeffersonian, especially this one who seemed more pitbull than interrogator. She wouldn't feel surprised if he accused her of abducting Angela. "Is that relevant?"

"Yeah, it is, Dr. Saroyan." Aubrey emerged from the litter of agents and she practically sighed with relief. "Was this a regular place for them to eat lunch?"

"Yes. Angela felt confined to home, work. . . ."

"Got it." He turned to relay some orders. "Track their way up to the roof and all the possible ways down." He turned back to her. "Dr. Hodgins was drugged?"

She nodded. "I took a blood sample and it's being analyzed now. We think it might have been the food."

He turned to another agent and ordered that the food be wrapped up and brought down to the lab. "And check Whey Chai's. See if they have a new delivery guy." He turned back to her. "Your lab will handle the blood and food and fingerprints. My techs will sweep this place and take it down to your lab. You got room for them? It'll be faster that way."

She bobbed her head. "Hodgins was taken to. . . ."

"American. Yeah. I have an agent on the way to talk to him the moment he wakes up."

Taking in a deep breath, she felt as if she'd never get enough air.

"Guy made a mistake." Aubrey's voice was comforting. "Someone must have seen him come up or go down. Or he left something behind."

But as she wound her way back to the lab, she knew only one thing for certain: their suspect had left behind a very frightened, but very determined lab.


	30. Grovel

**Grovel**

 _How would she react when she awoke?_ _Would she do as the other had done and scream? Or would she_ _ **grovel**_ _and writhe on the floor like some spoiled child unwilling? Or would she remain comatose, frozen by fear at what he might do? Or would she just know that she could be his muse?_

 _It did not matter. He could keep her drugged for some time as he contemplated how best to use her._

 _And use her? Oh, he must. For the exotic eyes alone. It was a shame he had used that other face when he could have had this one._

He tucked the satin around her sleeping form. _Only an artist such as herself, only an artist who had sketched and sculpted the dead as she would know how his work paralleled her own. She would understand the pure artistry of what he did. There was a symmetry to it: she took the dead and made them come alive and he took the live and made them dead._

He stepped back from the tableau he had created: a woman at rest in an open casket, her breathing still evident, but her whole posture one of. . . what was the word? _Yes, yes,_ he thought _, repose._

But the image bothered him. _Perhaps it was too. . . ordinary. A visual cliché._ _It was all wrong._

For some time he stared at the woman, her dark hair contrasting so artfully against her pale skin and wondered if maybe he had been too hasty in taking her.

 _No,_ he thought, as he brought the lid down. _Let her experience the stages of dying as the others had. She will see as the others could not._

 _She will help create the finest masterpiece of them all._


	31. Swear

**Swear**

He'd been somewhere between wakefulness and the blessed oblivion of sleep when the call came. At first he thought it was their little man fussing in his crib, and mumbled something about Bones tending to him, but the chirping continued and he pushed past the call of sleep to take a different kind of call.

"Booth, man, I. . . they made us **swear** not to call you or Dr. B. . . but under the circumstances. . . ."

Bones stirred beside him in the bed and whispered a warning not to wake the littlest Booth. But his gut, so sure earlier that week that his friends had been hiding something, now warned of something far worst than a lie or an unhappy infant.

"What's wrong, Wendell?"

The mattress shifted underneath him as Bones sat up in bed. "Booth? Why is Wendell calling?"

"It's bad. Real bad." Wendell's voice, low and mournful, almost screamed of cancer cells and deadly prognoses.

But this was a different kind of tragedy. Wendell laid out details of a growing horror show of body parts at the Jeffersonian culminating with a body snatching from a secure building.

"How long ago did this happen?" He was already half out of bed and well into investigator mode. "What did Aubrey get on the sweep of the area?"

Wendell sketched out the details. "I'm sorry. I know they didn't want to worry you, but I thought Dr. B ought to know."

He ended the call, his mind racing. Bones' voice seemed far away even though she sat next to him.

"What happened, Booth? Did something happen at the Jeffersonian?"

"Yeah." He tried to collect his thoughts as he turned toward her. "Something's happened to Angela. And it's not good."


	32. Shoot

**Shoot**

They came straight from the airport, Booth striding into the lab with Christine draped across his chest, Brennan carrying the baby on one arm, a diaper bag slung over the other. Except for the early hour and a brusque request from Brennan for a room for her children followed by another to see the bones, this could have been the family returning from a vacation.

She chose to ignore the lack of greeting and led them to Brennan's old office. "The daycare will be open before Dr. Stires comes in."

"I can call Max, Dr. Saroyan." Brennan paused before setting the carrier on the coffee table. "I am no longer an employee here and am not entitled to use the daycare services."

Years of working with the woman had taught her that the clipped manner of speaking hid emotional turmoil roiling beneath the surface. "I will speak to them. Under the circumstances, I think they'll make an exception."

Brennan straightened just as Booth bent to lay Christine on the couch. The little girl opened her eyes for a moment before closing them and nestling down onto the cushions. Brennan pulled a blanket from the diaper bag and laid it over her daughter.

"Aubrey's going to **shoot** some files over to Angela's computer," Booth said sotto voce. "Is there someone here who can run it?"

"The FBI can have a computer tech here in 15 minutes."

He nodded before bending to brush a lock of hair from Christine's head and replacing it with a kiss.

Then he turned to her. "Someone should have called, Cam." His voice was low so as to not disturb his children. "We're all more than just friends."

His tone was steely. "Yes, Seeley."w3rt

He glanced at Brennan and turned toward the door. "Let's do this."


	33. Switch

**Switch**

Having her there gave him hope. Never mind that she wore a white lab coat and had said very little to him, she was as much a part of the Jeffersonian as the granite cornerstones of the lab.

"What do you see, Wendell?" she said finally, her gloved finger pointing toward the ribs with their carved message.

He had expected the question, but not the informal use of his first name. He knew she was looking for something beyond what had already been reported, but he had to start somewhere. "The bones are unusually clean, not greasy, like you'd expect. But since they were carved, the person doing the carving would have wanted them to be clean when using the rotary tool."

A hint of a smile encouraged him. "They seem unusually lighter in color than one would expect," he added.

"Did you take a look at the DNA analysis?"

The switch between topics with someone other than Dr. B might be confusing, but he knew she was leading him to an answer.

"I only saw the print-out of the sequence, not the. . . ."

She had put the high resolution image up on the screen and everything seemed to come into focus. "The marrow alleles are altered." He looked at Dr. B. "These bones were treated with ultraviolet light which is something we do before storing the bones."

He brought up the scan on the finger bones and found the same anomaly. "Someone took the bones from bone storage."

She looked grim. "That would be my assessment as well."

"Why the hell didn't Dr. Stires figure this out?" Angry, his voice filled the room. "We could have looked for someone with access to Limbo. We might have caught this guy already."

"We should tell Booth and Aubrey."


	34. Promise

**Promise**

"We're still looking at anyone who knew the ins and outs of the place," he said as images filled the screen of the Angelator, "but so far we don't have much."

"He knows enough to avoid security cameras," Booth offered as all they saw were pictures of empty stairways and hallways. "He goes through a service entrance with a food cart and takes it all the way to the roof without setting off alarms."

"Cart?"

"Best way to get her out of here."

Booth's head did that little shake before he came up with an alternative. "He's been here before." The gold lighter was out and Booth was flipping it open and close. "There could be someone who's helping him on the inside. Someone who doesn't realized they're helping him."

He brought up the floor plan of the Medico-Legal Lab and all the entrances and exits, halls and stairways that fed into the roof. He could practically see how it had happened, but they were missing a name, a face to put to the offender.

"I made a **promise** to Hodgins to let him know the moment we had something, but. . . ." He rubbed at his eyes and wondered when he'd sleep again when Dr. Brennan and Cam entered the office.

"The bones probably came from bone storage, Booth," Dr. Brennan said.

"I called in the other interns to help determine which drawers they came from," Cam added.

They didn't say anything, but the look that Booth and Brennan exchanged probably said more than he had in the last half hour.

"Put up an image of Angela's crazy classmate," Booth ordered. "And put them up next to all hires in the last 6 months."

"We're going to find this bastard."


	35. Crawl

**Crawl**

While it wasn't rational, time seemed to **crawl**.

HRT had taken up positions around the old house as one member scanned the structure for heat signatures.

 _Signatures,_ she reminded herself. _Angela has to be alive._

She'd matched an old photo of Angela's classmate to the security images of everyone who passed through the service entrances of the Jeffersonian, matched a college-age Ray Plahm to his 37-year-old self and set this rescue in motion.

Booth had joined Aubrey and the other FBI agents on the front line around the house. Her children had pushed her well behind that line to a position of safety.

And yet, if she could, she would be there, at the front, wanting only to end this and find her best friend alive.

The radio crackled next to her. "We have confirmation," a whispery voice relayed to her. "Wait for go."

The signal started the slow movement forward. She watched the team close in on the house, each step marking one less moment of captivity. Again, it wasn't rational, but she could also feel the frisson of tension dragging at each second, the air thick with anticipation as the team made its final approach.

"She's got to be in there," Hodgins whispered next to her.

Catching his hand in hers, she held on as much to give comfort as to get it. The man remained pale and unsteady, the drug he'd been given still lingering in his system, but he'd insisted on being here.

Without a sound, the HRT moved in. Even at that early hour, when the dawn was slow in breaking past night, she could see the dark objects moving closer before they disappeared into the house.

Then a silence that only heightened the uncertainty.

The radio crackled back to life.

"She's not here."

 **Author's Note:** My laptop had a psychotic break, convinced it didn't have an attached keyboard or trackpad giving me a slight nervous breakdown. Finally convinced it really was a laptop and really did have a built-in system for communicating, I had to track down the story bits I had already written and finish them off for today's installment. Still have to find my chapter for _The Odds in the Gambler_. Hope the laptop didn't chew on that.

I want to thank everyone who's reading this, and reviewing or PMing me on this story. I do appreciate feedback because it encourages me to keep at this.

The first thing I wrote in the Bones universe was a meta look at the 5th season and all the hue and cry for B&B to be together. Tapped that out over my lunch break one day and submitted it thinking I'd never write another story and no one would really read it. I was so thrilled that people had read my silly story full of typos and all that I wanted to write something else. Tried my hand at other stories going all angsty or at the other end of the spectrum, trying a more humorous approach to the Bones dynamics at play. While I try not to actively seek reviews, I am grateful for them because they give me an idea that maybe I'm on the right track. And given that I somehow seem to be juggling three stories, they can spur me on toward finishing them.

I hope the ride continues to be an enjoyable one. And I hope both the laptop and I maintain our sanity as we bump along here. Just remember to keep your hands inside the ride at all times. . . .


	36. Hell

**Hell**

If this wasn't one of the rings of Dante's inferno, he wasn't sure what was.

Agents led them through the house to the cluttered basement workshop.

"It's rather small," Brennan said. But he didn't much care about the size of the man's studio.

He'd lost her.

"We have to find her," he repeated, his voice raspy. "We can't let this bastard have her."

Brennan was off in her own little world while he resided in **hell**. "Aubrey, you need to do a complete search of all this guy's relatives and anyone who knows him. We can't just. . . ."

Aubrey stepped right in front of him. "We're looking into all of that. This is the only property that we could find in his name. Apparently he changed his last name back to. . . ."

He broke in, repeating what he thought Aubrey should do, what the damned FBI should do, but they were just talking over each other, the man trying to calm him while he was feeling desperate.

"You can't just stand around here," he stiffened as he tried to intimidate a man in a bullet-proof vest with a kind of verbal firepower. "Do something to find my wife."

Just then he heard a ripping sound and turned around to see Brennan and Booth pulling a piece of paneling from the wall revealing a hole.

"We need a light over here," Booth ordered.

Flashlights were trained on the black hole, illuminating a hallway that disappeared downward.

"Booth."

Brennan was pointing toward the dirt floor of the hall. He leaned in.

There was a set of footprints and a drag mark that looked like a person had been dragged. Then he felt a large hand on his chest.

"Gun goes first, Bug Man."


	37. Grin

**Grin**

Years in the field had given him a lifetime of images, but nothing like this.

In his office, a little girl was reading a story to a baby. She'd read, then turn to the child and push on the seat so the baby would jiggle and giggle, then she would read some more.

It didn't seem to fit the gravity of what they did there in the Lab.

"Dr. Stires?" Dr. Daisy Wick made her usual entrance, talking and walking at once, a bottle in one hand and a baby monitor in the other. "I'm so sorry. I went to heat up the bottle and Dr. Edison stopped me and. . . ."

He let her wind down.

"I don't mind that you left your son here, Dr. Wick," he offered. "You have a fine little babysitter here."

Daisy gave him that look which meant he was in for another torrent. "Oh no, Dr. Stires. These are Dr. Brennan's children."

The information was like a punch to his gut. The girl had Tempe's eyes, her fine features, while the baby looked more like. . . .

"She and Booth are helping locate Angela. They came in early this morning, which was _really_ early and. . . ."

The little girl had stopped reading

"They've found something?"

"Oh, yes. Dr. Brennan discovered that the bones had been taken from Limbo meaning it had to be someone on the inside. . . ."

As she kept explaining, he couldn't help but look at the children. _I should have known,_ he thought. The baby looked at him with a massive **grin**.

"Shouldn't you feed this little one, Dr. Wick?" he interrupted. He felt the need to escape. "I'll go find Dr. Saroyan and see what I can do to help."


	38. Hug

**Hug**

He looked like he was about to fall over and instinctively she braced him in a hug.

"Booth will find her," she said, the words as true as any she had spoken. "He will find her."

He pulled back from her, nodding, still a bit unsteady. "Here." She pulled a stool from the rubble in one corner and positioned it next to a table. "You should sit."

Reaching out, he guided himself gingerly to the seat then looked around. "This is a goldmine of. . . ," he rubbed his head, ". . . of something. If we had gloves and some evidence bags. . . ."

More than once in the years she'd worked at the Jefferson, she could reach into her jeans or into a coat pocket and find a stray glove that had found its way there during the day. Reaching into her pocket, all she could find was an orphaned roll of candy. "This will have to do."

"LifeSavers," he read as he reached for the roll. "That's appropriate."

She retrieved the roll from him, took a piece, then stowed the roll in her pocket. She looked around. The walls sagged, the rows of bricks swayed with age and the vagaries of the thaw-freeze cycle in the ground behind them. The floor, little more than compacted dirt, had been further tamped down by the presence of so many boots in the basement.

"Angela knows what to do," she said. "She's very strong."

Hodgins' head bent and she could hear him sigh. Then he looked up, his eyes moist. "She didn't want to worry you. Thought you and Booth would. . . ." He sighed again. "Do what you're doing right now."

"She's strong," she repeated. But she couldn't give any more reassurance than that.


	39. Burn

**Burn**

They fell into a familiar rhythm, he taking point as Booth trailed a few steps behind. HRT had been dispatched to surrounding homes to look for other entry points, the tunnel too narrow, too uncertain to allow full team access.

They walked single file, their lights running across the walls revealing tree roots recently cut back and exposed rocks. Scrapings along the wall marked what could have been struggles and he silently thanked God they left Hodgins behind.

His headset clicked on and an agent buzzed in his ear. "From what we could tell, there's no other access to the tunnel." She sounded out of breath. "Just nothing." The line went dead and all he could hear was his own heartbeat.

The tunnel widened a bit, then drunkenly narrowed and twisted. He thought attics were creepy, but he now added tunnels to that list as the wall seemed to move in places.

He didn't much care to think of what was moving along the walls.

About 20 feet in, the tunnel forked. He broke the silence with a curse.

Directing Booth to the right, he took the left. This branch seemed no different than the other, the walls covered with more roots, more creepy, crawly things, more spider webs.

Then the tunnel stopped abruptly with a wall of dirt and rock. Backing up, he could barely turn around when his earpiece exploded with Booth's voice commanding someone to stop.

Then hellish silence.

He tried to twist around in the narrow space, but all he did was **burn** valuable time catching himself, then dislodging a shower of dirt and rock and insects before righting himself and racing toward the other tunnel, his voice alerting others above ground of the danger below.


	40. Kiss

**Kiss**

She woke inside a dream or was it a nightmare her body weighted and weightless all at once, her head lolling. "Jack?" she called, but her mouth, dry and her throat assaulted by the moldy air, could only produce something like a soft creaking sound. Trying again, she produced the same result.

 _Focus, focus. . . ,_ she told herself, but her eyes refused her bidding, blinking like a lazy camera shutter. _Dark, murky shadows. . . moss curtains. . . or cobwebs?_ _Watercolors dripping into. . . ._

 _Focus. . . ,_ but her eyelids, leaden with sleep, barely opened. "Jack?"

Letting her eyes close, she tried to feel her body, yet she could not feel her legs and her arms felt boneless. "Bones-lesssh," she slurred.

And her head. It pivoted and bowed and jerked up, then fell when the weight of it became too much. "Jjjj-ackkk?"

Then another grey dreamscape. Thoughts soft and scattered. Sounds muffled within murky air. Smells. . . .

A **kiss** of warm air touched her cheek, waking her and she strained to remain awake. See. . . . where. . . what. . . .

Consciousness escaped again and she tumbled back into an uneasy rest. "Jja. . . ."

Then something pulled her back to awareness even though she couldn't name a damned thing she saw. Movement drew her eyes. . . . "Jjjaa. . .Jjjaaa. . . ."

Biting the inside of her mouth, the pain allowed her to focus. . . she did not know this place. . . she did not know this man. . . or woman. . . .

The sound of something breaking, voices sharp and a larger man attacking the smaller, movements washing around her like brushstrokes painting madness. . . then nothing.

Nothing.

oOo

 **Author's note:** We'll try this again. I really did post this chapter, but FF didn't agree. Neither did some sharp-eyed readers.


	41. Mute

**Mute**

His tunnel ended in a door—a wooden door that seemed incongruous against the walls of dirt. The knob refused to move, so he did the only thing he could, he laid his shoulder against the door and pushed.

Creaking on the first try, he laid his should into it again and drove it open, splintering it from the jamb. The room beyond lay in shadows and when one moved, he barked an order.

But nothing stopped. In fact, the room seemed to attack him at once, flaying at him, ripping his earpiece free and trying to wrestle the gun and flashlight from his hands.

Again, he put his shoulder into his attacker, driving him backward into the room, trying to leverage him off his feet, trying to neutralize him.

He had to stop the whirling dervish who seemed far too willing to take a blow, far too willing to take as much punishment as he was willing to give. Driving his elbow into the attacker, he caught him just at the bottom of the ribcage and he drove upward, a hard gasp telling him he'd done some damage. Easing up, the assailant crumpled to the ground, breathing hard, but holstering his gun, he hauled him up to his feet and patted him down before releasing him. The man who had the face of Angela's college classmate, folded back onto himself onto the ground.

Pointing his flashlight at the man, he ordered, "Stay down."

A breathless Aubrey appeared behind him. "You seem to have all the fun." He pulled out his cuffs. "I'll take care of him. Is Angela here?"

That was the question as he played his light around the room. Canvases and drawings stood in **mute** testimony that she was not there.


	42. Suffocate

**Suffocate**

"Where the hell is she?" The words echoed in his head as he pulled the crazy to his feet. "She dies and God help you."

He looked right back, looked toward Booth, looked back at him. Booth had picked up one of the smaller canvases and was pointing at it with his gun. "Tell me where she is and I won't shoot you."

Despite being unfinished, it was Angela. The wasn't quite FBI, but Booth wasn't and the loon began to quake. "She's so lovely. I wanted to see how loveliness looks as I **suffocate** her. . . ."

"Where is she?" he repeated. "He'll kill you and it won't be artistic."

Their captive did the head swivel thing again, but Booth had had enough. "Your end of the tunnel. Is it closed up?"

"Caved in. There's nothing there. . . ."

Booth was out the shattered door, mentally and physically steps ahead of him. "She's buried? You buried her?"

The man half-shrugged, but his eyes followed Booth. "Hell," he said as he dragged their suspect through the door, "you put her in there, you sure as hell ought to dig her out."

The man became agitated, careening against the earthen walls like a pinball, creating a shower of soil that turned the creepiness of the tunnel into a torrent of fear for his personal safety. "You better stop it or we won't let you see how she looks suffocated and all."

The suggestion mollified the madman a bit. At least it ended the walls trying to bury them both. He pushed his captive through the tunnel, past the crossroads and back toward the original basement, all the while his protests growing stronger. By the time they hit the basement, Hodgins had already heard and was waiting for them.


	43. Punch

**Punch**

"Is this him?"

Hodgins remained unsteady and quaking, but well aware of who might be coming from the tunnel. When Aubrey nodded, she had already stepped between Hodgins and Aubrey's prisoner and with one well-aimed **punch** , she leveled him.

"Where's Booth?" she asked, the adrenaline fiery within her.

Aubrey looked at the man puddle at his feet. "He took the left tunnel. We think Angela. . . ."

Hodgins made the first move this time and she followed, a flashlight having been pressed into her hand as she grabbed at a broken flowerpot and followed her friend into the inky chamber.

Catching up to Hodgins was easy enough, the lack of light slowing him down. But she gave up the light to him and together they picked their way through the tunnel, finding the junction then turning left. They could hear panting, hear the soft thuds of earth hitting earth, hear the desperation in Booth's voice as he called to Angela.

"Booth? Let me."

There was no argument as Booth pressed himself against the wall and let Hodgins past. Hodgins began clawing at the soil with the flowerpot, scooping away the soil before tossing it behind him.

With little room in that space, all they could do was watch helplessly as Hodgins scratched away at the earth.

"Move over," she ordered and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Hodgins in that small space, she clawed at the wall with her hands.

Again and again, she pulled at the soil, hitting rocks and debris that cut and scraped her hands, but she thought of Angela, of being buried and afraid and certain of only death.

Someone pressed a trowel in her hands and a small shovel in Hodgins and they kept on, sometimes Booth stabbing at the wall above them with a crowbar.


	44. Strong

**Strong**

"Angela?"

Her name came out every third or fourth scoopful, the name competing with breaths. _Be_ _ **strong**_ _._

"Angie?" _Be strong, love._

He was leaning against Brennan, his drug-addled body finding comfort in hers as between them they seemed to be moving a mountain.

"How. . . the. . . hell. . . ?" he gasped, sweat making the shovel slippery in his hands.

"There was a cave-in of the tunnel." It was Aubrey, panting alongside Booth who was working behind them. "Created a hole which he filled from above." Aubrey was pulling away dirt from around them. "If the room on this side of the tunnel still has its supports. . . ."

He didn't want to think, didn't want to fill in the words. But his mind was already calculating, already projecting a scene above ground where heavy machinery had already been hauled in to find bodies, far too heavy and far too clumsy to locate the living.

 _They would find her_. _Be strong, Angie. For me._

"I told him I'd let him be a witness to all this." Aubrey's voice became swallowed up in the digging, in the dirt of the walls. "Told me there's 10, maybe 12 feet of this between us and. . . ."

A storm of dirt rained down on them for what seemed like eternity then became a trickle.

"Bones? Hodgins?"

Brennan sputtered next to him. "We're fine. Our light's buried, though."

Booth passed them a flashlight and he felt like someone had poured cement around his feet for they were buried in dirt and muck. Brennan stared back at him in the glare of the light, the dirt turning her into a shadowy figure.

"Dig." They bent to it as hands behind them freed their legs from their newest prison.


	45. Defenseless

**Defenseless**

She hugged herself against the silence, against not knowing if Angela was alive.

Around her, the Medico-Legal Lab thrummed with work. The latest set of remains had come from a construction site in Maryland, a set of bones buried for over a century before a bulldozer had unearthed them. Dr. Stires had already made short work of determining the age of the bones.

"Dr. Saroyan?"

A tech had tracked her down and presented her with one of the hundred papers she put her name to daily, each one as important as the next, but somehow not as important as the search elsewhere.

She signed the evidence release and forgot it immediately as the tech disappeared from view.

What she did remember was her friend's wit, her reactions to their work, her generous heart. What she did remember was Angela's ability to capture a person's humanity in a few strokes of her pencil. And no matter what she did, no matter where she looked around her, she was **defenseless** against these thoughts roiling around her mind.

"Dr. Saroyan?"

She turned automatically, her pen at the ready to make short work of whatever was held out to her.

"Dr. Saroyan?" Her mind lost in an endless loop, it took her a moment to recognize Dr. Stires in front of her.

"I've matched the remains to a Walter McKay." He gave her a folder. "Newspaper records of the time match his age, build, general. . . ."

She stopped listening, nodding as he explained his process, seeing only his lips moving and the speech garbled against her own mind's tortured circuit.

". . . I've made the arrangements."

"What?"

He touched her arm, bringing her back. "They're doing all they can, Dr. Saroyan."

"They're good people. They're doing their best."


	46. Discover

**Discover**

Each shovelful brought them closer to something, but nothing either one of them wanted to acknowledge. Again and again they gouged the earthen wall, tearing another small piece of it away before stabbing it again.

They measured progress in rubbery muscles and shooting pains, in kneeling as they dug when their tunnel turned into a funnel. They measured progress by blisters and grime, by showers of earth that warned them of potential disaster, by sounds of shovels scraping dirt.

Her trowel thudded against something hollow, but she barely noticed. Then again and she stabbed at it to be sure.

"A door?" Hodgins rasped out the words, his voice almost as played out as her arms.

He then attacked the wall with his shovel until he produced a hollow sound like a heartbeat.

Hands pulled her to the side as Booth slid into her spot and punched at the door with the crowbar. Hodgins, too, lost his place to Aubrey who outlined the door with his shovel.

She leaned the light on the ground shining it between them, catching a glimpse of Hodgins' face in its glow. He looked as spent as she felt, but he called out hoarse encouragements to the men.

Then came a splintering of the wood, a dull crack that lengthened as Booth literally tore the top part of the door loose.

The emptiness beyond the door swallowed the light and she crept forward with it, putting herself between the opening and Hodgins as if to shield him from the sight of what they would **discover**.

She gave Booth the flashlight that he shone into the opening. Their section of the tunnel became dark with uncertainty until she heard her husband's voice offer up some light.

"She's here," he called. "And she's got company."


	47. Action

**Action**

Years ago in El Salvador, he'd seen a man make the bones of the dead sing and dance.

The people there didn't understand that science of it, didn't realize that all the man had to do was to soak the bones for days, then place them in the fire where the natural shrinkage would cause the bones to move within the flames, where heating would cause the bones to make their sounds in protest of their treatment as moisture escaped.

No. They'd shrieked in wonder and fear as the bones did their dance, jumping high within the fire, hissing and singing as the medicine man orchestrated their reactions.

It had been a pretty impressive display.

In the lounge above the Medico-Legal Lab, he knew no one below would ever know of his medicine show. The El Salvadoran had plied his magic to cement his stature among his people. His "magic" had been a simple sleight-of-hand, a substitution of one name for another for something far more tangible than deferential bows.

Given the emotional turmoil of the day—a frenzied search for a kidnapped colleague, then a warm clue turned into a hot trail—no one had even been witness to his little magic act.

Which was just fine with him.

"Dr. Stires?"

He turned a bit too sharply, the **action** causing a small tidal wave in his coffee mug that splashed his lab coat. "Miss Warren?" He swiped at the growing stain.

"Dr. Saroyan has signed off on the remains and they're ready to go."

"Very good." He smiled. "Very good. I'll meet you downstairs."

She gave him that quirk of a smile and turned to go.

"Tempe writes novels for her money," he thought to himself. "I just write a different kind of fiction."


	48. Sport

**Sport**

"Rats!"

"What's wrong?"

"Rats."

"Rats?"

"Yeah," he shouted toward his feet. "Plague, Ben, Piped Piper, the whole crew." He shone the flashlight around the room again. The floor was moving.

"Grading papers would be nice about now," he muttered to himself. He belly crawled from the opening backward toward the others.

In the dim light, both Bones and Hodgins looked like they were still digging at the wall of dirt, sweat beading their brows.

"You okay?"

"It's a bit. . . close in here." Bones looked like she was ready to flee. She swallowed. "Is Angela. . . ?"

He hadn't given any thought to their past experience underground, but he understood the look of panic on Hodgins' face was more than concern about his wife.

"She's breathing, but it's shallow. Like she's sleeping or. . . ."

"Drugged." Hodgins wiped the sweat from his face. "Probably she's drugged with the same thing he used on me."

"Look," he was making this up as he went along, "I'll go in feet first and. . . ."

"Shoot them, Booth."

"Shoot who?"

Bones swallowed again. "The rats. Not all of them. One or two. It'll draw the others."

"A female rat who is receptive can mate 500 times in a 6 hour period." Hodgins voice became a machine gun of facts. "A pair of brown rats can have up to 2,000 offspring in a year. A man in California had 1,000 rats in his home when animal rescue workers. . . ."

"Just think of shooting them as some kind of **sport**." Aubrey should have been the sanest of the three, but he wasn't offering a better idea. "Ten points if you get the biggest one."

"Fine," he said pulling out his gun. "Just don't tell Christine I shot Templeton."

oOo

 **Author's Note:** For those of you not up on your literary rats, Ben is the name of a rat that is the leader of a gang of violent rats in the movie by the same name. The Pied Piper is hired by the town of Hamelin to eliminate all the rats, but when he feels betrayed by the townspeople, uses his special abilities to lure the children from the town. Templeton is the name of the rat in _Charlotte's Web_ that helps supply Charlotte, the spider, with inspirational messages to help save Wilbur, the pig. I would think Booth or Brennan or both would have read the stories of the Pied Piper and _Charlotte's Web_ to Christine at some time.


	49. Memorable

**Memorable**

His first kiss. . . . The first time with a girl in his bedroom. . . . The deaths of his parents. . . . Earning each of his doctorates. . . . . Being hired at the Jeffersonian. . . . That first case when his science solved a murder. . . . That first date with Angela. . . . The Gravedigger burying them. . . . When Angela finally said yes, but the law said no. . . . Gormogon destroying Zach. . . .When yes became no. . . . Unlocking the truth about Kennedy. . . . Getting married in a jail cell. . . . The Gravedigger's conviction. . . . Her death. . . . Vincent Nigel-Murray's death. . . . Michael Vincent's birth. . . . His son's first steps. . . . His money disappearing because of Pelant. . . . Jeffrey. . . . Going to a bank to take money out instead of putting it in. . . . Starting up the hot sauce business with Finn Abernathy. . . . Shutting down Pelant. . . . Sweet's death. . . . Deciding on Paris, then undeciding. . . . Ending one chapter with Brennan and Booth. . . .

He had had so many memories over the years, milestones and millstones, of sorts. But probably the most **memorable** was walking out of that damned house and into the fresh air—his hands blistered, his muscles aching, looking like he'd been mining coal for 12 hours. The real prize leaning on him, groggy and puppet-like, stepping into the golden sunlight for the first time in what seemed like forever and whispering the words he cherished most above all else:

"Jack? Did something happen?"


	50. Die

**Die**

"You okay, Bones?"

Her fight or flight response was heavily weighted toward flight, but she answered her husband quickly with a lie. "Yes."

They'd stayed behind almost out of an old habit.

"If you want to leave, Bones, it'll be okay." His voice was soothing. "Aubrey will be back with a tech team and they'll do this." He snapped another photo of the area with his phone.

"I'm not leaving you, Booth."

"Do you feel that?"

"Feel what?" She was desperately trying not to feel anything.

"There's fresh air coming from somewhere."

"From ther?" She was holding a flashlight toward the top of the door.

"No." He moved around the room, pausing, pushed away a rat or two with his shoe. "I feel it. . . here." He stood at a far point in the room waving his hand above him.

"That doesn't make sense," she offered. "If he wanted Angela to suffocate. . . ."

"There's a vent up there," he said, shining his light toward the ceiling. "Probably piped to the outside." He raised his phone to take another photo.

She took a deep breath. Below her rats scurried along walls or snacked on the Jelly Bellys Aubrey had thrown in for them from his stash.

"I'm out of juice. Bones? How's your phone?"

She pulled it from her pocket and handed it over.

"Why are you doing this, Booth?"

He huffed. "A feeling. Our 'killer artist' steals bones, drugs people so they aren't aware of what he's doing, sticks them underground to suffocate them, but supplies them with air."

"Did you hear that?" Hypersensitive to everything around her, she seemed to hear the ground settling around them. "Listen."

From somewhere in the room, they heard a faint voice.

"I don't want to **die**."


	51. Exile

**Exile**

Somehow the newspaper headline got the story right and wrong at the same time. Yes, two women had been rescued from the clutches of a madman who had tried to create some kind of artistic statement about the fragility of life, but the reporter had only managed half the story.

Diving into his second breakfast plate of the morning, he considered the photograph on the first page— Angela's gurney rolling out of the crowd of jackets and suits, her husband at one side, him at the other. But buried behind all those officials were two people, both civilians now, who kick started the investigation, riding in from their **exile** out in Michigan to save the damsel in distress and get a two-for-one bonus in finding another victim of the mad artist.

"Hey."

He looked up at the knight in T-shirt and leather striding into the diner and earning more than glances and smiles from the wait staff. Swallowing his surprise with a swig of coffee, he watched as Booth slid into the seat opposite him.

"I guess congratulations are in order," he started, trying to keep his emotions in check. "I heard Stark wanted to talk to you and I figured it was to bring you back into the fold."

Emotions, like his hunger, weren't easily contained and he tried to swallow back the sense of disappointment that came with the idea of losing his position as chief investigator.

Booth waited as the waitress poured him a cup of coffee before leaning in and giving him the news himself.

"I'm back with the Bureau," he admitted, "but it's not what you think."

He suddenly lost his appetite. "Okay, just lay it on me."

Booth blew on his coffee. "I'm back with the FBI, but as an instructor at Quantico."


	52. Plead

**Plead**

". . . And Henry Frogcutter rested easily that night and for several nights that followed."

"The end."

Angela flipped the last page of the packet and looked toward her friend. "It's. . . it's adorable, Brennan."

The smile of satisfaction said it all. "I tested it out on Christine and she did seem to enjoy it."

Her own hesitation hadn't been anything more than a struggle with the concept—Dr. Temperance Brennan writing a children's book both achingly sweet and educational. Her friend's heart could be amazingly deep. Hell, hadn't she left Michigan and a life void of murder and mayhem to rescue her?

"So you've given up on big kids' books," she sipped her iced tea enjoying playing hooky from work, "steamy science and steamier sex wrapped up in a mystery?"

"No." Brennan looked almost shocked that someone would suggest that she had given up on Kathy Reichs' adventures with her FBI hunk. "It's just that I've read so many children's books. . . ."

"I know, Sweetie." She leaned across the table and squeezed her friend's hand. "I'm so glad you're here. Beyond the whole rescue thing."

"I missed you, too, Angela." And Brennan did what she often did—surprised her again. "Booth, the children and I are moving back to Washington."

Whatever else Brennan was going to say was lost as she grabbed her friend in a Brennan-like hug.

When she finally let go—and she did hold on, uncertain if she were still under the influence of the drugs she'd been given—Brennan was teary-eyed.

"Sweetie, I thought I'd have to **plead** to get you to come back."

"No," Brennan said. "Booth liked teaching, but he hated papers and politics and not necessarily in that order."

"Besides, I need you to illustrate my book."


	53. Missing

**Missing**

The man slid into the booth with all the grace of the snake that he was.

"Starting early?"

He downed the whiskey and signaled for another. "I'm off the clock."

Without the liquor, he might have been less blunt, but the whole business made him sick. He smiled up toward the waitress, but the young thing looked as shopworn as he felt. His fingers wrapped around the glass.

"It's done." He held the new drink to his lips. "It's done, I'm done, _we're done_."

He drank, letting the whiskey flood his throat. The glass rattled against the table when he let it go. He stood.

"We could do this in that fishbowl of an office of yours." The man's tone was pleasant, but the implications weren't. "Let your colleagues know how you pay back an old debt."

Hesitating, he wondered if he could hurt the man enough to make his own pain worthwhile. He sat down.

"I need another." The man signaled for another round of drinks. "It's an easy thing to do. The **missing** are found and the found become the missing." He smiled. "You do the honors of burying _the unfortunates_ under paperwork or legal niceties or what-have-you and it ties up loose ends for my people."

"Once." He leaned in, the drinks making him bolder than he had a right to be. "One damn time. That's all I signed on for. Once."

The man's arm coiled and struck, his hand grabbing at his collar and pulling him practically across the table. "James Bond, 1975. Once is Not Enough."

The man's breath overpowered him like gas fumes. "Wrong movie. It wasn't Bond."

The man grinned, then released him, letting him fall back to his seat. "Maybe. But it's the terms of your contract with us."


	54. Luck

**Luck**

Three weeks in the pull began.

He tried to dismiss it as one would a scratchy throat, but it persisted, reminding him every chance it got. A conversation with Aubrey, or a promo for one of the dozen or so procedurals on TV and he was right back in it, right back where he'd promised Bones he would never be again.

But unlike a cold, he couldn't simply take two aspirin and drown himself in chicken soup.

Five weeks in he found his thoughts straying so much, he doubled up on Gambler's Anonymous meetings and hit the gym to exercise away the demons.

It did not work.

By the sixth week knowing morning devotions at a local church weren't helping, and the extra mile he put in his runs was only giving him more too much time to think, he started digging a vegetable garden in the backyard and building a fort for his children.

He still felt the pull.

So one night with sports highlights wrapped around Hank's late-night feeding, he logged onto the FBI server for a midnight snack to feed his own curiosity. He told himself he'd only gone in to check on the status of some old cases, to remind him of an upcoming court date, but he had gone there to find something to satisfy the hunger that was gnawing at him.

At first he found only a few tidbits, an unsolved case, a dollop of information about missing persons, an informant gone missing.

His gut growled to alert him that there might be something here, but as **luck** would have it, there was a different kind of pull at the doorway.

"Booth?"

He logged off the site and closed the laptop. Bones scooped up their son.

"Just had to check a score, Bones."


	55. Rescue

**Rescue**

He found her in the extra bedroom that served as her studio, the lamp illuminating one corner of the room where she sat at the draftsman's table they'd picked up at a local flea market. Hunched over, she was adding flecks of detail to a colored panel while half a dozen others sat propped against the desk.

"Couldn't sleep?"

She looked up over her shoulder and he got the answer to his question. Her eyes seemed far too dark, far too wild before she turned back to her drawing.

"I wanted to finish to show Brennan," she said. She tossed aside one colored pencil for another and she hesitated.

"Are these for Brennan's kid book?"

One drawing featured a curly-haired boy trailing a girl with raven black hair while another had a child that looked suspiciously like Christine climbing a tree.

"I wanted to give her some choices. I mean, she has these kids doing all kinds of things, science things and I just wanted, I just wanted, I just. . . ."

She ran out of steam and he recognized that look—a bit lost, a bit uncertain and he stepped closer and caught her as she rose to bury her face in his neck.

"I can't close my eyes without. . . without. . . ."

"I know," he soothed. "It's okay. The guy's locked up and he can't hurt anyone."

No matter how many times he reminded her since the **rescue** , words alone can't banish the images that haunt her. "He's locked up, Ange. They're not going to let him out ever again."

Her body softened in his arms and he considered walking them back to their bedroom when she presented another nightmare.

"I just can't help thinking, how did he get those bones out of limbo?"

oOo

 **Author's note** : Thanks to NatesMama from Bonesology from saving me from myself by pointing me toward the list of words I started this little adventure on. I hate unfinished stories and have every intention to finish both this little puppy and _The Lies in the Truth_ before the twelfth in the twelfth. Hopefully I can remember to write in past tense again. I'll get a running start with this one and then after I've re-read the elephant that is _Lies_ , I'll start up that little woofer and then I'll. . . .


	56. Abort

**Abort**

"Maybe you could introduce me to her sometime?"

The young thing slipping on panties he'd helped slip off was making it known who the real hero of the afternoon was. He watched her wrestle her breasts into a bra.

"I mean, she's the reason why I'm in forensic anthro. She's my hero."

Mostly he tried to concentrate on the reverse strip tease, but the girl's words deflated more than his sexual afterglow.

"She's to science what Madame Curie was. Or Amelia Earhart."

He didn't correct her last example despite wanting to and as her lithe, 20-year-old skin kept shrinking and shrinking from view as she dressed, he tried to **abort** the thread of conversation entirely.

"I didn't know you were such a _fangirl_."

The word, meant to stop the kudos directed toward his former student from his present one, had a decidedly opposite effect.

"God, yes!" She leaned forward as she pulled on a shoe, her cleavage offering an enticing view. "She's writing novels, letting people know all about the science and solving cases with the FBI, facing down serial killers. She's a real-life Wonder Woman."

"Who's no longer at the Jeffersonian," he pointed out, his voice even although that was the only thing about him so calm. "She's at home making babies."

"A sabbatical. I heard she's writing a new book." She sat on the bed with her back to him as she pulled on her shoes. "Two books. An academic book on forensic anthro and another one of the Kathy Reichs' novels."

She blocked enough of the mirror to protect his reflected expression, but she couldn't hide his tone.

"With me you'd be on the front lines, not changing diapers."

"That's where you're wrong," she countered, a smile slicing through his argument. "She's got what I want."

"Everything."


	57. Possessed

**Possessed**

"Guy was **possessed**. Wanted to see Kinny-achooman or some such thing." Aubrey raised a fork. "All the BRI types are tingly because they've got Mr. Art-of-the-Gross to study."

Bones was out of earshot and he figured that was good. She'd remind them all how far removed they were now from crime fighting.

"No shop talk, Aubrey." He eyed the steak on his plate. "Just good food and light conversation."

The agent craned his neck to see around the corner. "I just figured that with Dr. Brennan out of the room, I could update you." He picked up a glass. "I kind of figured that was why you invited me to dinner."

"Food. Light conversation." He nodded toward a bowl. "Eat."

"It's just, it seems odd that this guy looks up Angela after all these years and decides she's going to be the center of his latest art piece." Aubrey grabbed another potato and started to unwrap it. "That's only the start."

"We invited you because. . . you know, family. . . food. . . ." He leaned in, kept his voice low. "Okay, before Bones returns, what did you find out?"

Teaching wasn't the same as being in the field and he listened as Aubrey outlined the progress they'd made.

"Thing is," Aubrey said as he stabbed a spoon into the casserole, "we haven't found a. . . _cure for the common cold_."

"And it's not likely that you will." Bones appeared at the doorway. "A common cold results from hundreds of viruses." She took her seat. "And you are not a scientist."

He exchanged looks with Aubrey and speared a cucumber, when the world tilted a bit.

"I know Booth doesn't want to talk about this, but I'm curious if you have any more information on the case."


	58. Graveyard

**Graveyard**

"You're not answering your phone, Dr. Stires."

The voice—one he thought should be reserved for cartoon weasels—was instantly recognizable. Closing his eyes, he tried to gather his strength as he turned from his car. "When I'm working I tend to shut it off." He reached into his pocket. After the third phone call that afternoon, he had simply turned it off and now pressed it on as proof for his words. "I'm sure. . . ."

He stopped speaking as the hulking shadow stepped closer—so close he could feel the heat of the man's breath.

"Play it that way if you want to, Doc. I don't care."

"I don't have a clue what you're talking about."

It was the wrong thing to say. He felt the collar of his jacket pulled up and tight around his throat, his phone clattering to the concrete of the parking garage.

"You want to play games, Doc? You want to see just how long it'll take for you to run out of breath? Or do you think someone will show and I'll have to let you go? Which will it be?"

"Got nothing to say?" The man pressed his face closer to his. "Then let me make a suggestion, Doc."

"Answer the phone when I call. Then do what I tell you to do."

The violence of the initial attack was reversed as the man shoved him away and he found himself stumbling backward, hitting the ground hard.

The man pulled an envelope from his pocket. "There's going to be another body in your lab and you are to make sure that he goes to the **graveyard** with that name and no other. " The man threw the envelope at him. "No more games, Doc, or I'll get rough with you."


	59. Trail

**Trail**

If he'd learned anything over the years of being an investigator, it was this: follow the **trail**. Money, relationships, locations—it didn't matter; the trail would lead to answers.

Until it didn't.

"I don't get it," he said as Caroline Julian stood at the foot of his desk. "I know where this guy was when he supposedly fell off the map, I know he was on his meds and then he wasn't, but I can't figure out how he got access to the Jeffersonian like he did. He'd have to go through at least three checkpoints and he'd have to know the layout of the place, have a key code, not to mention access to. . . ."

"Cher?"

Miss Julian had that look—the one that he couldn't quite decipher since he'd seen it so rarely—that he couldn't help but stop then start up again.

"I'm just a bit frustrated. He seemed to know where cameras were, seemed to know how to get past security. . . ."

"Cher?"

"I mean the guy was like Mole Man underground and all, planning this, but he was pulling people off the streets, not going into a secure facility and grabbing up bones and. . . ."

"Agent Aubrey."

It was the voice of a drill sergeant— _if he had ever had a drill sergeant_ —and it scared him silent.

"I'm afraid one of those trails you're so fond of following has ended."

His thoughts immediately went to the office and the man— _the legend?—_ he had replaced and he started to protest—hell, he _was_ a very good agent—when the prosecutor held up her hand to stop his protest.

"Cher, the trail has ended because your suspect was found dead in that room of his at the loony hospital."


	60. Walk

**Walk**

"You know I've missed this."

"Walking?"

She laughed and hugged her friend. Brennan was just so deliciously literal sometimes that it surprised her again for the hundredth time.

"No, Sweetie. This. _Us_. Being in the same state. Talking. Walking your baby; playing hookie from the lab."

Hodgins had suggested she sleep in, but she had become restless and had invited herself to her friend's house for the day. Sure, the drawings had been an excuse, but the real reason for the visit had everything to do with spending time with a woman who oozed strength.

"I've missed being with you, too, Angela."

The path led to a park and they took up seats on the benches as her friend gently rocked the stroller. Little Hank smiled and gurgled.

"Technically, I'm not playing hookie from the lab." Brennan liked preciseness. "Although you might have wanted to do something more today than simply **walk** Hank with me."

"No, Brennan," she countered, "being with you and Hank is exactly where I need to be."

"Although I would like to be in Paris."

That earned a wistful look from Brennan. "I, too, am very glad that we are in the same state again. I missed you."

"I wish you were at the lab." She blurted it out, but she felt no regrets. "Stires just seems so, I don't know, creepy nice."

Brennan paused. "I don't know what that means, but Michael has always been charming."

"He also seems to forget things you'd be all over."

Before she could explain what she meant, her phone chirped. She read the text.

"There's a body at the lab, but Stires is doing the ID on his own." The lab pulled at her, but she turned off her phone. "Pretty soon he won't need any of us around."

oOo

 **Author's notage:** Thank you for hanging in here with this story and thank you for the kind reviews. I'm trying to

I'm trying to double up a bit here because I'm going to disappear until next week sometime and figured that it would be nicer to inch the story forward a bit faster before a great silence again.

One day I might just leave in all the little love notes that my cat "writes" when she uses my keyboard to get to her favorite spot. She has an amazing ability to make the computer do things that it takes me several minutes to undo or finds ways to interject more nonsense into my nonsense. Maybe she's into writing ala Archie and Mehitabel.

Enjoy the weekend wherever you might be and _Go Cubs!_ (Long-suffering fans are allowed some hope and cheerleading ;) )


	61. Plunge

**Plunge**

Two agents sidled along the exterior brick of the factory, guns drawn, their actions precise and studied. Each step brought them closer to the huge metal garage door meant to admit trucks with a smaller door next to it. Without hesitation, the lead agent signaled to the woman trailing him and then holstered his weapon before picking up a rock, his intention clear as he focused on the glass window in the door. With one strong heave, the window exploded in a hailstorm of glass shards.

Within seconds, their entry became compromised as a storm of gunfire erupted before a horn sounded, ending the exercise.

Booth emerged from his hiding place, his only weapon a clipboard.

"I don't have to tell you. . . ."

"No, sir, you don't," said the woman who barely glanced toward her partner. "We're dead."

"Your mistakes?"

He listened as each agent broke down the scenario, dissecting their actions from the moment they stepped from their vehicle. When they were finished—really, when they had run out of things to critique—he added his own.

"You missed the foot prints leading to the door." He studied their faces. "You didn't check for another approach."

Both agents looked chagrinned—a word he'd picked up from one of Bones' novels—and he made them walk back to their vehicle before retracing their steps and trying to impress on them the need for hypervigilance.

"You used to take a civilian into the field."

The woman made it a statement, not a criticism. "Yes. My partner was a contractor, not an agent.

"A scientist with great observational skills that saved our lives more than once."

He let that sink in before a **plunge** into a new scenario.

"Shortcuts can get you killed. Get civilians killed. Remember that."


	62. Jump

**Jump**

The shoes gave her away.

Not specifically the shoes, but the sound of the shoes. He thought of that sound as a pedal-powered machine gun, a rat-tat-tat-tat of officialdom coming his way via $200 designer pumps.

And he was ready. A few keystrokes, an uploaded photo, a falsified ID and he had all but finished his analysis of the body without really examining it.

"Dr. Stires?"

He turned and presented the first of that day's lies. "I've already determined this is an unfortunate accident."

She gave him a nod as he explained his reasoning—not difficult since it had all been scripted for him.

"I could call Angela in for an ID."

"Already done. The ID, that is." He smiled. "A day off should be just that."

"Well, then I should get some tissue samples."

This time he shook his head. "I'm afraid, I got a **jump** on that, too," he said. "There are tissue samples in your office."

He earned a slight curve of the lips that quickly straightened into a thin, administrative line of neutrality. Saroyan, he knew, offered much less resistance to his presence here than did the others, so winning the war meant winning her over

"I was just used to doing everything out in the field when I was in the Middle East. Having specialists is a bit of a luxury for me." Not quite a lie, but not quite the reason for harvesting the tissue.

"Then I should run the samples."

She turned, but he called her back with a confession of sorts. At least she would think it an admission of vulnerability, something women like her loved.

"Look, I know I've got a long way to go to earn my place here," he said. "But I'd like to think I'm a team player."


	63. Self-Conscious

**Self-Conscious**

"He's a putz."

Booth emerged from their bathroom bringing with him the scents of mint and soap as well as a comment about Michael Stires.

"Do you mean that he is an idiot or he is. . . ," she paused at this part of the definition, "a penis?"

Booth almost grinned as he climbed into bed beside her, his Captain America boxers on full display as he lay over the covers.

"Both. The man was a dick." The bed shifted as he pulled a pillow behind him. "Men like him don't change."

"Change is a constant. Evolution. . . ."

"I don't mean that, Bones. The science thing. It's psychology. Stires had no reason to come to the Jeffersonian except by taking your job. . . ."

"I left, Booth."

". . . To show everyone that he was better than you." Booth leaned toward her and eyed her computer screen. "But he's not. Why do you think you were asked to examine that bunch of bones from Salvahatchee something for State?" He shifted back to his side of the bed. "It's because you are the best."

"Cam asked me. . . ."

"It's a big case for them and they don't want it messed up by Stires."

"Like, I said, Bones. He's a putz."

She closed her laptop on Cam's email. She was not **self-conscious** about her relationship with Michael—she had grown a great deal since then and Booth had no reason to believe she felt anything more for her former mentor than sadness.

"Maybe I should take Cam's offer."

Booth leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. He lingered by her ear. "You should, Bones. Show Dr. Putz the student has passed the teacher and left him on his ass in the dirt."


	64. Suspicious

**Suspicious**

With a sidelong glance through the cage of his office windows, he saw her. Certainly, an older version of the graduate student he once knew, still beautiful, still alluring, still Tempe. Her face betrayed a fullness brought on by the latest pregnancy, her hair shorter, but the posture, the mannerisms—all unmistakably her.

 _Her_. He wasn't **suspicious** , just. . . cautious. Dr. Saroyan had already warned him he'd be sharing the lab with Tempe as she did a special project for the State Department, a final chapter in a long novel covering a certain terrorist's penchant for making Americans targets in his own little version of David versus Goliath.

Goliath wanted to make sure that its David was dead.

 _Her_. He couldn't help but glance at the binders, those fiendish repositories of the mismatched information he'd used to identify two corpses as accident victims when a second-year graduate student would know that they were victims of anything but the vagaries of fate.

Even the board member who'd bent the rules, pretzeled the ethics of his situation, hadn't been able to insert him into the equation. They had wanted the best, the very best—unimpeachable, with a proven track record of convictions, whose passion for the victims had never wavered.

According to Tempe, he'd blinked his away years ago.

"Dr. Stires?"

He left thoughts of regret and he turned toward the voice. She stood there, arms crossed against her middle, the officious stance he'd begun to hate.

"Dr. Brennan will be in the Bone Room today."

The school teacher keeping the kids separated, he thought.

"I can assist, Dr. Saroyan." He began to stand, but her hand stopped him.

"No need. We've called in a former intern."

Long after she'd gone, he felt the sting of the insult.


	65. Mistake

**Mistake**

"Dr. Bray?"

It was odd to hear the title in front of his name, but to hear it from his mentor was more than a little surreal.

"Your findings?" His silence—the brain-tongue connection temporarily unavailable—elicited his first reprimand as a full-fledged doctor. "I hope I did not make a **mistake** in choosing you to help on this case."

"No. . . no, not at all Dr. B," he sputtered trying to re-focus. "No, it's just that. . . I really have to thank you for the notes on my dissertation and helping me prepare for. . . ." Okay, so he'd been verbally constipated just seconds before, but now he found that he couldn't stop the flow of words.

And Dr. Brennan stood there and listened, let him have his moment of insanity brought on by a degree. He wound up his second dissertation in as many days, sputtering to a halt.

"You have a very fine mind, Dr. Bray and you've been invaluable on many cases over the years." The hard veneer softened. "And I am very proud of you."

If they weren't standing over a pile of bones, he might have hugged her right there, but he tried to swallow back the emotion and focus on the remains.

But Dr. B had other ideas.

"I hope that the interest in your dissertation from corporations hasn't altered your interest in forensic anthropology, Wendell."

The use of his first name made him pause and consider what she was saying.

"There's certainly more money involved in the corporate world," she said, her blue eyes intense as she considered his future. "But far too many scientists become enamored of financial success or recognition to contribute to the body of work in the field."

"I hope you don't take that route."


	66. Complicated

**Complicated**

Years as a federal coroner had taught her the importance of people and tools. Mostly people, although the tools held a special place for her, especially in a state-of-the-art lab such as the Jeffersonian.

But people were the strength of a place like the lab and watching two people work such as Drs. Brennan and Bray gave her a good feeling.

It wasn't **complicated**. She missed _them_.

"You do understand why I requested that you put your best people on this case."

She gave him a simple, "Yes," although in some small way she thought she should be thanking him. "I appreciate the gravity of the situation, Mr. Radziwill."

He handed her a State Department pouch. "This is time-sensitive and all results must be inculpable." There was a pause. "This is all the information we have on the bastard. Dr. Brennan should be able to determine whether we got the right man."

His eyes remained focused on the movements within the Bone room. "Well?" With his palm up, he pointed toward Brennan.

Not used to the brusqueness of the diplomat, she hesitated which gave him an opening.

"Beyond the cult of death perpetrated in the Arab world by radicals, we have this particular warlord who made it his mission to eradicate all non-believers, and from what we can tell, believers as well who opposed him."

"We need him to be dead."

What else could she do, but nod? Yet the question lurking about ever since State had requested Dr. Brennan's service could no longer be denied and she voiced what many in the lab had been asking.

"Why didn't you want Dr. Stires to examine the remains? It seems like it would be a simple case of identification."

Radziwell minced no words. "Not everything that smells of lemon is lemonade."


	67. Black Out

**Black Out**

"Your mom's got a different job today," he said as he snapped Little Hank into the car seat. "Checking out some stinky bones while I'm chauffeuring you around town, little man." Out of habit, he sniffed his son. "Stinky bones, no stinky diapers, we're good. Let's roll."

He glanced at the back of the car seat as he pulled out of the drive, then turned his attention forward as Hank started his usual back-seat-driving babble.

"Da-da, buddy," he offered as he directed the late model Pontiac toward the pediatrician's office. "Da-da. _Me_. _Daddy_. Say it after me, _Daaah-Daaah_."

If Hank were listening—and without seeing him he wasn't sure if his son was more enchanted by his toes than his father's word—he continued to babble fragments but nothing remotely close to what Booth wanted to hear.

"We're going to have to work on this, little man." He turned into the parking lot. "Mom's got that whole breast feeding thing going on and it's just not fair. Daah-daah."

He kept talking as he parked the car and then opened up the back door to retrieve his precious cargo. "Daah-daah. . . daah-daah."

Hank only smiled and tried to put his foot in his mouth.

"All right. Maybe Dr. Strangan-what's-his-name's got some ideas on how to get you to say my name."

If the doctor did, it was going to have to wait as his phone chirped. He didn't expect the voice on the other line.

His _gut_ —long on vacation from crime fighting—came to life as the details accumulated like fallen leaves. The long-awaited "Da-da" erupted from his son like a burp, but he didn't catch it.

"The director's got a **black out** on the information within the agency. Three people know what's up besides you."

"Are you in?"


	68. Reveal

**Reveal**

He lay back and closed his eyes.

He'd escaped the Bone Room for a 30-minute break, a chance to work the kink out of his neck and feed the growl in his stomach with a stale donut washed down by watery coffee. Eyes closed, he could still see the bones on their tables, the reconstructed skull staring back with its one good eye socket.

"Hey brother."

Hodgins appeared almost as an angel with two steaming cups of coffee on a tray.

"You probably shouldn't be up here," he warned as he swiveled his head looking for security guard, but reconnected with the kink instead. "I'm kind of radioactive. Too many state secrets." He rubbed his ache.

Hodgins placed the tray on the table. "Neither one of us is allowed to talk about the case. Cam made me promise."

And that was just fine with him.

"So, can you tell me what your tests will **reveal**?"

He gave Hodgins a look. "Don't even go there. I feel like I'm auditioning for a job."

"You _want_ to work for the government?"

"You work for them." He turned toward Hodgins. "You've worked for them for more than 10 years."

"But I've not been inculcated by their propagandists."

He smiled. _That_ was typical Hodgins. The change of space was slowing altering his mood as he grabbed one of the donuts Hodgins had hidden under a napkin.

"It's been a roller coaster ride. One minute I'm a grad student, the next I'm a doctor and someone thinks my dissertation might be the basis for some new kind of safety device, then I'm consulting with the State Department. It's pretty insane."

Hodgin's grin was warm and welcome. "If anybody deserves good things, it's you, brother."

He stood. "Well, I'm not going anywhere unless I get back."


	69. Grotesque

**Grotesque**

He'd had one too many, but it didn't stop him from drinking another, especially sitting across from the goon.

Rain distorted the world outside the window reminding him of a day years ago when he'd begun an undergraduate class at Northwestern. One young woman, known as the thrift-store princess for her source of clothes and her arrogance, had just settled into one of the seats in the small classroom before opening up her mouth and changing his life forever.

"Hey, Doc, it's simple," the other man said as he swiped at the water beading his beer glass. "Just get the ID on the corpse they dumped at the Jeffersonian."

"It's not a corpse, it's. . . ." He stopped short sure that there weren't enough cells in his companion's brain to understand what _was_ at the lab." They've got extra security and no one's talking." He chugged down his drink and began to stand. "Can't be done."

The man grabbed his wrist to pull him closer. Practically folded over the table, he had no out but to listen.

"You walk into that lab, check the info." He brought him even closer and growled, "Look it up. Steal it. I don't give a damn how, just do it."

If it were possible, he pulled him closer, his face contorted into a **grotesque** mask of a pure rage. "Don't tell me, 'No.' Never tell me that. You have no right to tell me what you are or aren't going to do. Is that clear?"

Letting him go, he practically collapsed on the table, but tried to pull himself upright. Bile filled his throat and he tried to choke it down.

"You need help on this, Doc, just say the word. I can get you into that room."

"Just say the word."


	70. Swim

**Swim**

"You know, we could have done this over the phone, sir."

The speaker, a petite woman in her early 30s, slid into the seat across from him and set a large manila envelope on the table between them.

"As I said, Shaw, this is off the books."

Her hands rested on the envelope. "I don't understand why you didn't ask Agent Aubrey to look into this. He was your partner,"

He leaned back, assessing the agent. She wore the seasoning of a few more years in the Bureau, a little wariness that came from a few more cases under her belt. He picked up the bottle of wine he'd been nursing and poured her a glass.

"I know he was vetted for the Jeffersonian job, but I needed what didn't make it into the report." He smiled. "Besides," he said as he leaned in, "it's a little sensitive."

"Because your wife had a relationship with this Dr. Stires."

He'd expected it in the report, but for some reason, Shaw repeating it aloud made him uncomfortable. "I just want to know where he's been over the years."

"You could have Googled him, sir."

He leaned back, the younger agent thwarting his charm tactic. He decided to go with the truth.

"The Bureau is still investigating the security lapse that allowed a mentally ill man access to bone storage." She began to protest, but he held up his hand. "I know that they've cleared Stires, but I don't trust him."

"Is this a gut feeling, sir?"

"This guy would **swim** with sharks to get ahead."

She pushed over the envelope.

"I trust your gut, sir."

"The FBI is still looking into a security breach at the Jeffersonian. I didn't want to muddy the waters."

His friend didn't buy his answer.


	71. Resign

**Resign**

 _What's in a name?_

He remembered the line from freshmen English, remembered that it was more than just a question of identity, but given what he did, what it meant for him, he was practically giddy with the answer.

 _What's a name?_

He could read bones, determine age, race and sex, even suggest what the decedent did for a living. Bones could tell him so much—if he rode a bike, if she gave birth, if he smoked, if she danced. He'd found the causes of death and the activities of life written on the bones for hundreds of remains.

Yet he could never find a name etched on a skeleton.

 _That was the problem, wasn't it?_ he thought. _Was_. The solution to the problem had been simple and elegant and allowed him to tell the Neanderthal who then went on to tell his handler and then. . . hell, he didn't give a damn about who the information caromed off next. Electronics today were so small and portable and powerful, that you didn't need to be a superspy to eavesdrop on what happened in the Bone room. All it took were a few things from your local electronics store.

 _So what's really in a name?_

 _Hell_ , he didn't know what was in this name, the name he'd stolen, didn't much care as he sipped a congratulatory glass of wine at his condo. The geopolitics of the moment didn't interest him much. _His_ geopolitics did.

 _So, what's in a name?_

 _By this time tomorrow_ , he thought, _the Jeffersonian's board would ask Dr. Saroyan to_ _ **resign**_ _._ He poured himself another glass of wine. _That's what happened to administrators who botched security for the lab_.

 _And Tempe? What of her name?_

By giving up one name, he'd helped to destroy hers.


	72. Nonsense

**Nonsense**

"Look, we all know that it's **nonsense** that you would violate United States law and possibly commit treason by revealing the name of the victim you were identifying," Aubrey was saying, "but we're kind of short on evidence clearing your names."

Below them, the lab teemed with an FBI tech team searching for clues to determine their future. Above the fray below, she felt as if they were fighting for their professional lives.

"You really ought to go home." Aubrey seemed almost as shaken as they were. "We can handle this."

"No." Brennan shifted stiffly. "We can help."

She knew the FBI would never allow them to help in the investigation, but Wendell echoed his mentor's words. "We can go over again everything we did and how we couldn't have possibly leaked the name."

"We are more thorough than your FBI techs."

That last statement from Brennan unloosed her own concern. "This _is_ my lab."

Aubrey pushed back. "Contracted to the FBI and other government agencies for their use."

The implication was all too clear, but she pressed on.

"I can vouch for my people. Drs. Brennan and Bray had nothing to do with this."

Aubrey looked down at the floor then looked directly at her. "The three of you were the only ones besides State who knew his identity for certain. And the information was leaked before State was informed."

Before a war of wills broke out, Hodgins came bounding up the stairs and easily outdistanced an FBI tech trailing him.

"I found out what that substance was on the underside of the light table," he panted. He began to catalog the components before she stopped him.

"Just tell us."

"Adhesive. The kind that's found on duct tape."

"Duct tape?"

Wendell brightened. "Someone taped something under the table."


	73. Declare

**Declare**

He asked Caroline Julian to repeat herself because the words weren't registering.

"Without a little thing called evidence, you'll need to surrender yourself to the men out there."

With a head nod toward the men in the doorframe of her office, he tried to will his brain to function.

"I didn't do this. I didn't tell anyone the name because I didn't know the name until ten minutes before State knew it." He looked toward the large men who seemed to be growing larger. "We had finished all the tests and had nine points of comp. . . ."

He stopped because the old argument, the one he'd made in the lab, at the FBI and now in her office weren't working. Nothing was working. He understood evidence, understood how it propelled investigations, understood how a vacuum of evidence stymied a line of inquiry.

"Dead end," he heard himself say. "This is a dead end."

"Cher, releasing that name to foreign unfriendlies has unleashed a firestorm from the Middle East to Washington." Her tone hardened. "Dr. Bray, you've got State, the CIA and Homeland Security all scrambling to put out the fire before it becomes a raging inferno."

He tried to focus on her, focus on the words, but nothing was clear, nothing made sense.

Miss Julian's voice seemed far away. "The government needs someone to hang this on, and Cher, that's you."

He gasped for air as the two suits came up to him and said something to him in English, but he couldn't understand. He felt himself pulled to his feet, his arms pulled behind him as he felt the cool touch of metal on his wrists.

"Do you have anything you need to **declare** , Dr. Bray?"

He could think of only one thing to say.

"I'm innocent."


	74. Corrupt

**Corrupt**

"You should get a lawyer, Cam." He stood stock still as she flitted around her desk, and brought the computer back to life. "You can fight this. It's wrongful termination. You had nothing to do with the exam. You just provided the work space."

She paused as she stood and pointed toward the screen. A dark suit stepped forward and took down the names of open cases and her password. Then he shut down the machine and asked her to step away from it. Another man busily gathered cables as the computer went black.

"You have to fight this. You had nothing to do with any of this."

His hands went wide as he indicated the team of security people shadowing her. The computer was wrestled onto a rolling cart as Cam began straightening folders.

"Cam, listen to me. You have to fight this. At least get a lawyer."

She looked up. "No. I can't, Arastoo." She pressed her palm against his chest. "I've learned over the years that the guilty get lawyers. I'm not guilty. I need you and Hodgins and Angela to prove it."

He felt his heart bursting. "How?" He held her hand at his chest. "There aren't any bodies to examine. The only thing we've got is some remnants of adhesive and no idea if it held something or not or when it was put there or by whom. It might not even be related."

The suit looked past him. "Dr. Saroyan? It's time."

Time froze as he felt a searing pain in his chest and bent to kiss her.

When he straightened, he could only think of one thing to say. "It's a **corrupt** system that takes someone like you."

She gave him one last look as security guards flanked her. "Please find the proof."


	75. Wrong

**Wrong**

"Where's Bones?"

Angela's message provided enough details to know that everything had gone terribly **wrong** and he'd called in enough favors to find out where they _weren't_ holding her.

"Where is she?"

His anger had little effect on the other man who simply looked up from the paper he was reading. "You should check the FBI. We don't have her."

"That's funny," he countered, "they said you've got her, Alex."

"Me?" He held eye contact with the man. "No, Booth, _I_ don't have her. _State_ doesn't have her." He paused. "Try Homeland Security."

"They don't have her."

Alex Radziwell became thoughtful. "You must have jumped through fire to have them admit to anything over there."

"Where is she?"

"Who else could have her, Booth?"

The voice, low and soothing, a diplomat's voice, offered an answer he hated to think about.

"What the hell is going on, Alex?"

He wanted to fill the silence with a barrage of questions, but he held to the one as he watched the man slide off his seat and go to his door to shut it.

"Five people knew the name of that man and one of them is in this room, Booth." He let the information sink in. "Another was the President and two brought the remains to Washington."

He felt his gut twist.

"A $5 million bounty went out for that name, Booth. Our men in the Middle East didn't go through all they did to sell out their country."

"But someone at the Jeffersonian did."

"And you don't think it was Bones, Cam or Wendell."

Alex gave him that look, the one that pulled the twist in his gut tighter. "Before I give you that answer, Booth, I need to know something."

"How far are you willing to go for the answer?"

oOo

 **Author's note:** Thank you for all the kind reviews. Thank you, too, for the favorites, alerts and the fact that you decided to wade through fan fiction and alight on this story. I hope you're finding it entertaining in some small way.


	76. Right

**Right**

"You remember me?"

She nodded, his presence clearing up several questions while presenting even more. He stepped further into the room. "I'm sorry we had to do it this way."

She couldn't be sure of what he was talking about, so she remained silent.

"You're good at solving puzzles, Dr. Brennan. And this is a puzzle." Each word was pronounced slowly as if to emphasize the last word. "A puzzle you could help us solve."

"Is that why I was brought here?"

This time he nodded. "You probably have a lot of questions."

"No." He didn't indicate that the answer surprised him. "This isn't a detention cell and you aren't FBI." She considered her next words. "Since I did not release the name. . . ."

"Of someone who must not be named. . . ."

". . . And it is unlikely that Drs. Saroyan or Bray released the information, this has been done to flaunt our arrests."

He grinned. "I bet Booth can't pull anything over on you."

Her anger flared. "Maybe you should just tell me what it is that you want."

"Okay." He paused. "Your profile says that you appreciate honesty."

"Then you should have approached me with the truth."

He nodded. "Maybe. But we had to make this convincing."

"Is that why I was removed from the Jeffersonian in handcuffs?" Her wrists still smarted.

"You've run. A summer evading the FBI, Dr. Brennan." His voice changed. "We didn't know how well any of you would play this, so we created a. . . _situation_."

She crossed her arms.

"We need your help in making something **right**. Someone at the Jeffersonian may be the key to all of this and we need your help."

"Just tell me, Mr. Beck."

"Okay, but just call me Danny."


	77. Administer

**Administer**

His was the business of lies.

Who told them, why they told them, who they'd told them to. He knew how to peel away layers of lies to uncover the truth in order to **administer** justice.

But, what was the truth here? He'd been a pinball all day, bouncing between this person and that, each bruising him with information he just could not forget.

When he finally made the turn toward home, he felt tired and worn. And worried.

"Hey, Max."

His father-in-law made the slow rise from the couch. "Tempe working late?"

He nodded; now he had become the liar.

But Max wasn't fooled. "Is that what we're telling Christine?"

He studied Max's face. He shouldn't be surprised by anything after all that he'd heard that day. "How much do you need to know?"

"Just where is my daughter and is anyone in danger?"

It took him only a second to decide before he painted the picture in broad strokes, details straying into the territory of lies of omission. If Max saw any holes in his explanation, he said nothing.

"At least I can tell Hank," Max said.

It was meant as a joke, but he understood the message behind it.

"Look, I don't know when Bones will be able to come home," he said as he crossed over to the bookcase and picked up a small voice recorder. "She read a couple of those children's books she's been writing for Daisy's baby." He coupled the truth with a lie. "We can pretend Bones made these for Christine."

He earned the narrowing of Max's eyes. "Is this going to be anything like Pelant or when they sent you away?"

"Everything will be fine," he stated.

But he wasn't sure if it was a lie or not.


	78. Embrace

**Embrace**

There were three of them. . . and three of _them_.

Three lighted exam tables with instrument trays. Everything seemed to belong—even if the context seemed off—except for the man lingering in the shadows.

"You want us to examine some remains," Dr. Saroyan offered to the dark man.

His mind still reeled. "We've been accused of treason. Is this a test?"

Dr. B offered her own surprise. "Tell them."

The man stepped out of the shadows. "You're right. We want you to examine some remains."

But that wasn't the answer she wanted. "If you need for _us_ to **embrace** this task, then you need to tell _us_ everything."

"It's for your government."

Dr. Brennan stood there and said nothing. But her body language practically screamed.

The man gave in first. "I'm in the business of keeping secrets. I don't have to tell anyone anything."

He'd seen interns quake at the look she gave the man, had even seen Booth fold under her gaze.

"You can start with your name."

His expression remained inscrutable, but he gave in. "Danny Beck. . . ."

"CIA." Dr. Saroyan stood there, arms folded, her own gaze adding firepower to Dr. B's. "If you need our assistance, you could have asked."

"There are reasons why it had to happen this way."

He added his voice to the fray. "What reasons?"

The stand-off lasted all of a minute before they got their first answer.

"Zombies."

He heard himself curse.

"Walking dead. . . zombies. That's what we're calling them."

Beck stepped closer. "Imagine you've eliminated a cell of terrorists in a town, including all of the leaders. You think you've accomplished something and then three months later, the cell leader shows up somewhere else ready to do damage to all your good work."

" _Zombies_."


	79. Argue

**Argue**

This body was particularly. . . gooey. And the breeze didn't help. He wrinkled his nose.

"Could we could move this along?" The general disgustingness of the body had him feeling a bit light-headed and he tried not to think about the sub waiting for him at his office. "I think we'd all like to get going." The body seemed like it was ready to pop. "I think _he'd_ like to get out of the sun."

That earned him a few glances from the FBI techs. "Love to hurry this along, Aubrey," came the voice below him, "but we have to wait on _Dr. Stires'_ approval."

The entomologist stood knee-deep in the ditch holding a beetle that went protesting into a specimen jar. "Since he's become Dr. Saroyan, the man has insisted that no evidence from a crime scene can be released without his approval."

"So where is he?" He felt his stomach rumbling. "Everyone's here but the best man."

He meant it as a joke, something to relieve the tension, but Hodgins would have none of it.

"Don't let Angela hear you say that." He turned toward his insect gathering only to turn back again. "Or me." The hint of a turn reversed again and Hodgins squared his shoulders as he stared up at him. "A set of bones was brought in by the D.C. cops. He was supposed to send an intern to do the initial examination. Probably polishing the nameplate on his new office."

He'd read the transcripts of the Costello trial, the one where Stires smeared Brennan, and he knew better than to **argue** about Stires' merits.

"Miss me?"

He turned and saw Jessica Warren and almost forgot about the sandwich waiting for him at his desk.

"Let's see what we have here, Superman."


	80. Lose

**Lose**

Nothing really mattered except to get the body in and out of the lab as quickly as possible.

He'd tried to argue— _as unsuccessfully as every other time_ —that this wasn't a good time, that even though he was now in charge of the lab, he couldn't allow the remains to linger. So he what he usually did with these bodies: putting on a show of processing the body while manufacturing the falsified information that would become part of the official record.

It was a magician's trick done without any assistance because to have an intern looking over his shoulder or, _God forbid_ , Dr. Saroyan or Dr. Edison, he couldn't cover the deception.

That's why he had sent out that intern, Jessica Warren, to do the preliminary examination for the FBI despite insisting that he was to have final say in the field.

Now that he was running the lab—even temporarily—he would insist that they bring these bodies at night, when the lab was quieter.

"Did you say something?"

He turned from his work to find Angela Montenegro standing in the doorway of the Bone Room, a camera dangling from her neck.

"Ever **lose** it and talk to yourself?" He smiled, trying to soften the artist's icy stare.

"I was told that they'd need a facial reconstruction," she said, "but I see this guy could use one, too."

He froze. "That's. . . that's not necessary," he sputtered.

"It's what I do," she countered.

"Uh, no, I mean, I have the name of the victim. Victor Contreras."

The name stupidly rolled off his tongue—the name he was to bury with this corpse—and he stood there hoping it meant nothing to her.

She stood there for a second too long before turning away and disappearing from view.


	81. Monster

**Monster**

"You sound tired."

Her voice had that husky quality from too much coffee and too little sleep.

"We thought that if we worked long hours, we might be able to go home sooner. But they have us. . . ."

The words stopped abruptly; in the silence he heard so much. "It doesn't work that way, Bones. They set this up to cover what they're investigating and they'll keep you there as long as they need you."

His own voice took on an edge, honed on his anger and loneliness.

"I miss you and Christine and Hank. . . ."

And he missed her. _Badly_. "Christine's making a drawing of the day so you don't miss anything. And Hank? He's singing." His kid made up lyrics that nobody could follow. "Max said that Russ was the singer; always thought he'd be a rock star."

He heard her sigh over the phone and for a moment they simply listened to each other breathing, the distance much too far to bridge with just words alone.

He fingered his notes at the kitchen table. "Do you know a Dr. Rizzo? Tony Rizzo? From Portland?"

Her voice changed, driving past the sadness. "Yes. He's done work in Alaska."

"He said that the bones discovered in the. . . ,' he looked it up on the map before mangling the name and being corrected by his wife, "were Yupik?"

"Have you been reading my journals, Booth?"

"I've missed you. Makes it seem like you're here."

"Rizzo had empirical evidence." She hesitated. "Others disagreed."

"Stires."

"Why are you interested, Booth?"

"Stires would have sold the bones to a museum in Japan."

"He's not a **monster** , Booth. He had a disagreement with a fellow scientist."

"You'd call him an outlier, Bones."

Her silence she said so much.

 **Author's note:** I hope you all have a great weekend. Thank you for reading and reviewing and just being.


	82. Hit

**Hit**

The scowl told him whatever puzzle she was throwing at the computer was being thrown right back at her without a definitive solution.

"Ange?"

She punched at the iPad, changing the screen, but not the look on her face.

"Ange? _Angie_?"

His voice penetrated the fog of concentration and she turned toward him.

"I'm not ready, yet."

"I can see that."

"Stires gave me parameters for the murder weapon, but I'm not getting a **hit** that makes sense." She sighed. "I guess he finished Contreras."

"Contreras?"

"I think it would be better if we had gone to Paris." Her fingers played along the pad.

"Contreras? I didn't realize we had another body."

The scowl returned. "I offered to do an ID, but he had the name. It's all on the computer."

He turned from his wife to the other computer terminal—a holdover from the days Pelant reigned terror in their network—and within a few keystrokes, he had connected to the server and had found Contreras.

"God," he said as the photo that would accompany the report appeared on-screen. "It's him. _Victor_ Contreras."

Angela turned to him. "That's what I said."

"No, you. . . ." He saw her look and decided on a different tack. "You know who this is?" Her silence gave him permission to continue. "He was a financial adviser. . . lost millions of dollars from Mom and Pop investors." He looked toward Angela. "I'm sure that hundreds of people wanted him dead, but now. . . ."

"They'll get nothing."

Angela's words hung in the air; they knew how easily fortunes could be lost.

"It says he died of natural causes."

She stepped closer. "The skull seems _off_ somehow. More Caucasian than Hispanic."

He shrugged. "I wonder why Stires kept this one to himself."


	83. Build

**Build**

The completed skull stared back at him and for the briefest of moments he saw a face superimposed on the bony foundation.

"It's not him," he whispered, then repeated the words. "It's not him."

He rubbed at his eyes as Dr. B joined him at the table and made her own assessment.

"I concur."

They seemed caught in some kind of warp, too tired to talk or to do much more than stand in front of the skull.

"I need. . . ."

"Osteological markers."

It was Dr. B who filled in the gap for Cam, something he couldn't have done, not after 22 straight hours of reassembling bodies and deconstructing lies that had been told about them.

He stretched to ease the knot between his shoulders. "How so far?"

Cam was keeping count. "Eleven. Three more sets of remains." She rubbed at her temple. "Who knows how many more."

He bobbed his head, then began to list the markers that distinguished this skull from the photo of the man it was supposed to have been. He kept pace with Cam who entered them into the computer.

"I bet they've got this already," he said, cocking his head toward the door. "Document everything to **build** a case, but I bet they're listening in on everything we say and do."

Maybe it was paranoia brought on by long hours and strange surroundings, but he caught something from Brennan who had gone back to her set of remains. Stock-still save for her eyes, he knew that look.

"Dr. B, do you. . . ?" But a tug on his sleeve and a look from Cam stopped him.

He looked at the door, then back at his mentor. _She just might have something that even the CIA didn't know_ , he thought.


	84. Destroy

**Destroy**

He wondered what Bones would think of the people in the gardens outside the Jeffersonian. They weren't there for the splashes of roses or the bright sunshine or the warm breeze, but for a cyber hunt that kept them circling and veering, nose to their cell phones, as they tried to capture a digitized monster.

He was here to capture his own kind of monster.

Angela had created a minor miracle here, somehow turning the same gardens that had once been the site of his wedding into the stomping grounds of enough digitized creatures that it could only lure his prey to this site. While the crowd was mostly under 20, a few older players were popping up on the edges of the garden, swooping in to collect their own trophies.

So he waited.

That's pretty much all he could do besides pulling at threads that the FBI had forgotten. That and miss his wife.

He swallowed those thoughts as another wave of players joined the gathering islands and he scanned the faces of the additions over his own phone.

Nothing.

Without his FBI credentials, he had little authority to question anyone, but he'd had enough of the waffling and evasiveness and stonewalling.

He was damned tired of worrying about Bones and the others.

Then he saw him. He'd changed from his Jeffersonian uniform and now joined the crowd searching for cyber creatures. Engrossed in the game, the younger man didn't see him approach.

"Gotta love this Pokemon Go," he said.

The game still held the other man's attention until it didn't and recognition hit him.

"Yeah," he said as he held tightly to the younger man's sleeve. "I'm the real monster you've been hunting for."

"Maybe you should tell me how your mother got $15,000 out of no where."

oOo

 **Author's note:** I don't pretend to understand Bones' timeline and while I normally try to be respectful of the characters and their environs, I couldn't resist. Yes, I know that the Pokemon Go craze has just begun, and wouldn't technically play into the Bones universe at the time that B &B took their break from crime fighting, but I'd much rather think of that than this election year. And the heat. And work.


	85. Breathe

**Breathe**

The bones could speak to her in whispers of where they had been and what they had done and what had been done to them. She saw the faces of the deceased, understood how they died and often, how they lived, and she knew far more about them then a mere biography could tell her.

But when she saw that kerf mark on the bone, a third-party's violation of the integrity of the surface eating through the core, she could hardly _breathe_.

She recognized the pattern.

There were other markers, mere whispers on the bone, but she heard them all, understood their significance, knew that she should tell Danny Beck—or at least her team, but she knew she had nothing to bargain with except her knowledge.

And without Booth here to help guide her, she could hardly breathe.

Years ago she felt the same way. In the weeks that followed the kidnapping by the Gravedigger, she craved open spaces and had to fight through the panic whenever she got into an elevator.

It had been Booth who had reminded her to breathe, who had quoted some ridiculous statistics he'd made up to gently remind her that she was no longer buried underground.

But she knew that connecting that time in her life to this was not rational,

Weighing her options had been easy enough despite knowing her decision affected more than just Booth and Christine and Hank. Cam and Wendell deserved to go home, too. They deserved the truth.

The bone saw had left a tell-tale pattern, one she had seen years before. The kerf marks weren't quite a fingerprint or a DNA sample, but they were enough.

She knew who had worked on at least two of the bodies.

And somehow, that knowledge, made it difficult to breathe.


	86. Assist

**Assist**

The dark shadow on his living room couch came to life when he turned on the lights.

"Hey, Booth." Danny Beck had taken up residence on his couch. "Nice work on finding out who was selling tickets to see the bones at the Jeffersonian."

He considered the agent draped across his couch. "You didn't need to break into my house to tell me that." He tossed his keys on the kitchen table. Danny's tells had been trained out of him by the CIA, but that quirk of a smile couldn't quite be drummed out of him. "The agency is holding Bones and the others. I need to see them."

He got to that conclusion with more instinct than logic, but as he watched Danny not react, he knew he was right.

"Why would the CIA have them?" 

"I don't know," he said as he angled himself between Danny and the front door, "why would a CIA operative care about the arrest of a janitor?"

"I just thought that you were retired from all that, Booth, and then all of a sudden you're in for the _assist_ , making sure everything is nice and tidy." Danny smiled. "If you ever decide to come out of retirement, I'm sure the agency could find a spot for you."

His old friend stood. "Oh, pretty good security system," he said. "State of the art." He grinned. "You've got pretty much everything you need to withstand some kind of apocalypse."

"What do you have them working on, Danny?"

It was another leap made without the benefit of logic, but he understood how coincidences and hunches married to become facts.

Danny clapped him on the arm. "They're good people, Booth. I'm sure that whoever's got them will want them home soon."

And with that, he was gone.


	87. Stab

**Stab**

Maybe the computer search would have been faster, more efficient, but there was something quite satisfying about looking through the binders in Dr. Bren. . . _Dr. Stires'_ office. Computer files contained the pertinent facts, but the binders held much more—preliminary reports, full body X-rays, emails between team members—that always gave a more complete picture of the process.

And it was a note he was looking for. One particular note from Dr. Brennan.

He'd assisted for a day when his own lab had been between projects and later Dr. Brennan had sent him a note with one of her anthropological references that he had filed it away in the binder.

At the time it had been a mere footnote to the case, a sidebar, but now a brain worm had hijacked his thoughts and he wanted that note with a nod to a paper he was contemplating.

And it wasn't as if he could ask Dr. Brennan since she'd been spirited off.

Normally he'd be in and out, the organization of the binders usually flawless, but for some reason, they were out of order. Annoyed, he shoved two or three of them back into their places, then made a **stab** at finding the note.

He found something else entirely.

He'd opened the binder at random, hoping to find the reference number. But the report he read was. . . _off_. Curious, he tried another and another and . . . .

"Dr. Edison?"

Dr. Stires stood behind him.

"I was just looking for. . . ," he said. "A note. . . from. . . ." He babbled as he hastily returned the binder to its place. "I must have misplaced it somewhere else."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes," he said in retreat. "I'm sure it will show up."


	88. Bite

**Bite**

"It's about time you showed up, cher."

He'd barely walked into her office when she began to berate him. "I was just reinstated this morning." The badge weighed heavily in his breast pocket. "Danny Beck came to see me last night."

Caroline's eyebrows reached for the ceiling, but her tone hadn't changed as she harrumphed. "I suppose you thought a gift basket from the Welcome Wagon was more important than this?"

"He broke into my house."

That earned a softening of her expression, but barely. He outlined what he had gleaned from their favorite CIA operative— _what little there was given that he hadn't said anything specific_ —before Caroline drew his attention back to her computer.

"Your friend hacked into my computer and left me a little gift."

"You can't be sure it was Danny."

The gift—a number—looked like a case file.

"That's right, cher," Caroline said as she tossed him a file folder from one of the piles on her desk. "He's dredging up ancient history."

It looked like one of Bones' reports, dense with scientific diagrams and wording that escaped him. He looked at Caroline. "I'll **bite**."

"Vasilia Ratkovich was a scientist from one of the Soviet satellites in the 70s who had information regarding the USSR's nuclear capabilities or some such thing."

"He defected?"

Caroline leveled his gaze at him. "Escaped by dying. He switched places with a corpse and the rest is highly hush hush still."

It hit him all at once and he stabbed at the connection. "Bones and the others weren't arrested because of some security breach," he started. "They were arrested to do the same thing for the government."

"Maybe," she agreed, "or maybe someone has dug up a kind of bait and switch and your squints are sorting it out."


	89. Hunger

**Hunger**

The kerf marks on the bone hadn't changed overnight, the circumstances hadn't changed—nothing had changed with a good night's sleep. The words, dredged up from some past problem when Booth had assured her that everything would change in the morning just hadn't.

One look at Cam and Wendell told her that nothing had changed with them as well.

"Mr. Beck?"

He wasn't in the lab with them, but she guessed that he was listening.

"Mr. Beck and other employees of the CIA, my team and I are done examining the bones and writing reports until we have some answers."

The expression, "talking to the walls" came to mind, but one look toward her colleagues sealed her resolve. Snapping off her gloves, she laid them on the side of the exam table and began to unbutton her lab coat.

Cam and Wendell followed suit.

"So. . . we're on strike?"

Anger and a gnawing **hunger** to be home with her family had prompted her rebellion and now with Wendell looking hopefully at her, she laid out her case.

"You've had us examine 14 different sets of remains to determine if their identities matched those of the original examinations. Anthropologically . . . . "

"We work much better when we're trusted to be given all the information." Cam had joined the fray, taking a step to her side to stand with her. "Until that happens, we're not working."

Wendell's chimed in to put an exclamation point on their defiance. "The charges were trumped up or you wouldn't have allowed us to work on these remains. You wouldn't have trusted us to."

The silence that answered was. . . disheartening.

"Is it really a strike if we're the only ones who know?" Wendell asked as they stood defiant together in silence.


	90. Drama

**Drama**

She didn't even look up when the shadow crossed in front of her desk.

"Dahlgren, if you're looking for the report on. . . . "

"Shaw?"

Her head popped up from the report she'd been reading. "S-s-sir?" she stammered. "Is that you?"

It was a stupid question, a rookie mistake, but she half-stood, half-sat in a kind of half-assed salute to his return.

"I was reinstated," he said. "I'm looking into something that might have to do with the Jeffersonian."

"Yes, sir. . . ." She paused. "I can be done. . . ."

He shook her off. "Bones and the others were deliberately set up for a fall. But I don't think the CIA or Homeland Security expected things to go like they did." He brought up a folder she hadn't quite noticed. "I've already looked into personnel records over the last 12 months and they don't tell me anything I don't already know."

"I'm. . . I'm sorry about Dr. Brennan, sir. About the **drama** that went down."

He sighed. "The only anomaly was a campaign by a member of the board to recruit Dr. Stires. . . ."

"He was Dr. Brennan's mentor, wasn't he? He must be pretty special."

That insight earned her an odd look; she tried to swallow back her embarrassment for not quite saying anything right.

"He's something all right."

She tried again. "Sir? Agent Booth? If you've already looked into personnel records, I don't know how I can help you."

And FBI agent needed to be flexible, that's one of the lessons that Agent Booth had already taught her and she mentally kicked herself for forgetting that.

"Maybe you like desk duty too much."

The gauntlet had been thrown down; she wanted the assignment.

"Field work, sir?"

"No," he said. "Undercover."


	91. Passage

**Passage**

The very first time he'd stepped into the lab, he'd been impressed. The lab proved to be center stage for some of the most important forensic work in the country.

And it all had once been the domain of his star pupil.

Not anymore, he thought, as he made the rounds of the lab, checking the offices for stragglers, poking in his head at the smaller labs to make sure he was alone.

Alone except for the recently dead.

He'd wheeled that body into Autopsy still zipped inside its body bag. He'd do what he needed to do later.

But now he had something to do.

The changing of the guards. Oh, it wasn't some kind of B-movie subplot where a shift change could make or break what happened next. No. Simply put, the Jeffersonian had installed a new guard into the rotation and this one was one to watch.

To be clear, he thought, they were all ones to watch, but the newest one needed a few extra glances, a closer check of times in and out of the lab. As the acting chief of the lab—hopefully soon to be named the permanent head of forensics—his job was to know everyone who walked in and out of the lab.

And because of that other thing—the side jobs which had given him a rather comfortable financial cushion but were not strictly within the purview of the Jeffersonian's mission—he needed to know everyone who walked in and out of his

lab.

So after making his check, he waited at doorleading intothe lab, eyes focused on the folder in his hand. As if on cue, the guard appeared in the **passage**.

"Good evening, Dr. Stires."

"Oh, good evening Officer Shaw."

"It's just Shaw, sir. Or Genny."

 **Author's Note:** If anyone's keeping track, yes, I put "Drama" before "Passage." It was an honest mistake and if the FanFiction police want to take me away, then please know that no one will know what happens in the end. . . except me.


	92. Haunted

**Haunted**

If someone had told her the Medico-Legal Lab was **haunted** by the spirits of the dead who had passed through there, she might believe them. The main lab hid little during the day, but at night, every shadow in the place oozed possibilities.

Maybe that was the bane of being undercover—seeing _possibilities_ in every place and in every face.

She'd been at this for several days with little to report beyond sore feet and sleep deprivation. Oh, she could report the irregular times the lab emptied, the quirky personalities of the people who worked there, and the smell of . . . _something_ that marked the lab as _The Lab_ , but she hadn't really found out much more than Dr. Stires was a flirt, Dr. Hodgins sputtered covering up that he knew her, and that tech named Hsu always seemed to get nervous when she came by.

None of this was the bogeyman that Booth had sent her to find.

Those thoughts rumbled around as she made her walk-through of the lab, her not-quite-standard-issue flashlight trained on the darkest corners when she heard the sound. At first it seemed a bird trapped inside the lab, and she pointed the flashlight upward, but the light only became swallowed in the black. Hearing the noise again, she took a different direction.

The noise continued from Dr. Stires' office. A man was bent over dozens of open white binders.

"Sir?" She held her flashlight out like a baton. "This isn't your office."

"I know, I'm just. . . you're new? I thought. . . ."

"Sir?"

"I was looking for a note and. . . it wasn't right. These aren't right. It didn't make sense. . . ."

"What didn't make sense?"

He pointed. She looked.

Then she reached for her phone.


	93. Crisis

**Crisis**

He lingered on the image of Max and Christine walking down the hall, her bunny's ears dangling toward the floor. Toying with his beer, watching until they made the turn to his daughter's room.

Aubrey wiped his mouth, then leaned forward. "Does she know where her mother is?"

"In Florida seeing her brother." He took a swig of beer and allowed it to wash down the lie. "Christine doesn't need to know." He set the beer down and waved off the story.

Aubrey nodded. "Still no word?"

He shook his head then finished his beer. "Nothing from Bones, nothing from the lab."

He'd invited Aubrey home for dinner, partly to stave off the nightly rebuke from Max to do something, partly to pool their information. There wasn't much.

"You just put Shaw in the lab, what," Aubrey said, "four, five days ago? I doubt they're committing crimes on a schedule."

He rocked back in his seat. They'd already yanked all the loose threads they'd had; Danny's cryptic clues hadn't given them many more to pull.

"Danny's off grid, Caroline's trying to sweet talk CIA. . . ," he began to open another drink. "I've pulled strings, called in favors. . . ."

"And we're stuck at square one."

His gut told him something was happening at the lab, but without proof Stark was likely to pull Shaw.

"A review of the lab's files showed nothing amiss."

Aubrey's comment reflected the problem—nothing seemed wrong, yet his wife and his friends were property of the CIA.

His phone chirped.

He almost smiled at the news from Caroline. As he ended the call, he relayed the **crisis** created by Bones and the others at the CIA when his phone chirped again.

This time it was Shaw who'd found another string to pull.


	94. Dirty

**Dirty**

"Again."

Once was enough, he thought, as _J. Edgar_ Booth insisted he recount what he was doing in Dr. Stires' office. His initial reaction had hovered between peevishness and confusion and all he wanted to do now was go home.

"No," he countered as he started to close a binder. "No. This is really an internal matter for the Jeffersonian and frankly, it's not even my lab. Perhaps Dr. Stires. . . ."

Booth and the security guard exchanged glances. "If evidence a federal contractor provides is adulterated, deliberately obscured, falsified or. . . ."

Thankfully Booth raised a hand and halted the recitation from the guard. "Are these on the computer?" He pointed toward the pages he'd already pulled from the binders.

"What the hell do you _think_ is going on?"

He knew Booth could be just as obtuse as his wife, but something fueled the big man. "Just check to see if that case file is on the computer."

Muttering about the lack of a case number, the basic identifiers of the skull brought up photos of all those that matched the descriptors.

But his X-rays didn't match any of those.

"That's not possible."

"Clark," Booth said, "it is possible if someone is trying to hide something."

"Hiding what?"

Booth's answer made him regret asking.

It took him a few seconds— _minutes?—_ before he recovered long enough to deliver a line straight out of some Le Carre spy movie. "You obviously don't think I'm **dirty**."

A single shake of Booth's head wasn't enough reassurance, but he took what he could get.

"Wait, wait," he said as something just didn't make sense. "Why would someone hide the evidence in plain sight like this? They're sure to be found out."

Booth and the guard had nothing to say to that.


	95. Emotional

**Emotional**

Years ago he'd spent more than three weeks knee-deep in a pit of ambiguity, guarded by soldiers as he excavated the bones of their victims.

He knew then not to blink.

Aided by two whiskey sours, he refused to give in now.

"You want what?" The younger man looked past his prime rib dinner.

"Exactly what I said." He refused to become **emotional**.

His request was met with a laugh.

"You remember this?" He held up his fork. "Little intrinsic value. Utilitarian, a design we see across cultures and generations, but to a man in need of an eating implement, quite valuable."

He picked up his knife and began to cut at his beef. "The value of our arrangement is not in the money. What is it? Eighty to 120 a year? And the side payments aren't apparently much at all." He speared the meat with his fork. "But what is valuable here, the thing that has real intrinsic value, almost priceless as you said, was being the head of the forensics lab at the Jeffersonian."

The younger man punctuated his point by taking the bite from his fork. "I got you in the door."

Liquid courage had faded in the glare of his own words being used against his case. "You really don't think I could have gotten the position on my own."

He'd voiced his own fear and regretted it immediately.

There was that laugh again. "You've been selling out for years, Michael, refusing the purity of academia, Michael." He sipped at his wine. "All because Tempe outshone you."

Maybe it was the drink, maybe it was the truth, but he played the card he'd promised to hold back.

"You'll do what I want, or I'll expose the mess you made of things in the Middle East, Eric."


	96. Hide

**Hide**

 _What if you threw a strike and nobody cared?_

 _No, no_ , he thought, _that's not it._ _Are you really on strike if no one knows. . . ._

"Wendell? You're pacing again," Cam informed him. "And mumbling."

He sighed an apology.

His eyes darted again toward the door through which he expected Danny Beck or some strapping men to enter and demand that they end their work stoppage and identify the set of remains on the table.

No such luck.

 _Wrong phrase,_ he thought. It wasn't that he didn't agree with the strike, it was just that he was, well, . . . _bored_. No computer, no cell phone, no book—nothing to occupy his mind beyond a ream of paper they'd taken from the printer and a few pens and pencils. Boredom apparently did not affect either Cam or Dr. B who were surprisingly busy.

He found himself standing by his mentor, looking at the delicate drawing she had produced on her purloined paper, a cross-section of bone with decided kerf marks. Next to her was a remarkably accurate drawing of one of the skeletons they had examined.

And another and another and . . . .

"You're so bored that you're . . . ?"

He stopped himself from saying anything more. The lab offered no places where they could **hide** from the security cameras and the bugs that were probably there. She pressed a finger to her lips then wrote him a note:

 _If there is an omission, please let me know._

Even though he didn't understand why she'd done them, he began to examine them, each impeccably detailed. Dr. Brennan had captured identification markers as well as damage. He was so engrossed that he didn't see the door open and two strapping men enter the lab.

oOo

 **Author's Note** : Let me confess one of my many writing sins: I don't really plan out my stories except to have a general idea as to where I'm going with them. Don't ask me to determine if it's a cardinal sin or a venial one, that's not for me to say. What it does to this particular story is to make the rather lame title I chose for it to seem even lamer as the story probably won't end at 100 chapters. And since I don't outline these things— _even though I've tried_ —I can't tell you how many more chapters this story will last. Not many more as the cavalry is coming, but probably more than 100.

One last, very important thing: _**Go Cubs Go!**_


	97. Amnesia

**Amnesia**

The anger in the car was palpable.

With little more than a "We no longer consider you threats to national security," Danny Beck had released them into his care.

"I would like to see my children."

The tone, imperious and hurt, was echoed by Cam and Wendell in their own demands.

"Bones, Clark found something that doesn't make any sense at the lab and we need you. . . ."

He outlined what they knew, tried to highlight the mystery of it all if only to whet their curiosity, but nothing short of collective **amnesia** would change the chilliness in that car.

"We're under the gun here, Bones."

Crickets.

He couldn't blame them. They'd been caromed off one government agency to another and they were like Bones sitting as still as death, hanging onto that damned sheaf of papers she fought to keep waiting for the next betrayal.

He sighed, pulled out his phone and handed it to his wife. "Call Max. He'll show you the kids."

"Bastard."

The epithet had been softly spoken, but he recognized Wendell's frustration. "You're staying at our house."

"I could use some new clothes."

They'd been living in scrubs, and except for Cam's residency as a young intern, it had probably been the last time she's worn anything but designer wear. "Okay, you get the phone next and. . . ."

He finished his thought as he glanced at his wife. Her eyes were wet as she looked through the photos Max had sent as well as a few he'd managed in the last few days.

"I'm sorry, Bones. I called in all the favors I had and practically sold my soul. . . ."

He stopped as Brennan looked at him and made her own request. "Find out what happened to Eric Meehan."


	98. Funeral

**Funeral**

"He's dead."

Swiveling in his chair, he looked at Booth who had _demanded_ he drop everything and run the query. "Injured in Iraq, sent home. Year rehab. Typical stuff until a 2-ton vehicle did what war could not."

After delivering his _Reader's Digest_ version of a life, he swiveled back to the work waiting on him.

Until he felt the hard pull on his chair so he now faced the agent again.

"I need a complete work-up on Meehan."

He got them all—sleep-deprived, fact-deficient, guilt-ridden—it was the curse of an overnight researcher.

"He's not public enemy No. 1, Booth." he started. "I thought you'd retired or something. . . ."

A deep growl cut him off. "Complete work-up." His eyes lasered in on him. " _Everything_."

"Fine," he muttered as he set the query to several new databases, "no guarantees on who attended his **funeral**." Then he began to read the DoD file.

 _Damn._ "There's a. . . discrepancy here."

"What kind of discrepancy?"

He'd seen it before in such files—an incomplete timeline in a sea of redacted names and dates. "Meehan went over there as a forensic anthropologist, stationed in. . . ."

" _Discrepancy_."

He began again. "There are huge chunks of time in which he's off base. . . forensic anthropologists like him didn't make house calls."

"There had to be authorizations for him to be off-base."

He let out his breath through his mouth in a huff. "Damned if I know, but there's nothing here. They usually accounted for every minute they had in country."

He shoved back his chair and stared at the monitor. Gaps in service time, a year in re-hab. . . . Rehab?

He punched at the keysboard.

"Guys didn't get injured on base." He looked at Booth.

"Meehan was CIA."


	99. The End

**The End**

It wasn't rational.

They had come to the lab under protest, desiring only to go back to their respective homes and reconnect with family and friends. But thoughts of her children and her bed were easily dashed by what she saw in the files that Dr. Edison had pulled from the binders.

"Wendell?"

Startled, she forgot to address her former intern with the title he deserved, the guilt in the lapse over in a microsecond as she flipped through the evidence in the file.

"Dr. B?"

She handed him the papers, said nothing, her intention not to test him, but rather to allow unbiased observation to confirm what she already suspected.

His glabellar muscles contracted as he studied the file. He took several seconds longer than she had expected to react. "This isn't possible, is it?" The muscles deepened. "Can I see your drawings?"

She waited as he sifted through the sketches she'd made in the other lab, but she knew what his conclusion would be although he came to it slower than she had expected.

"My god." He looked at her. "This can't be, can it?"

"Cam!"

The coroner joined them at her former desk and took the file they gave her. It was Dr. Bray who prompted her. "What do you see?"

This time she waited a bit longer for Cam to see what they had seen, but the coroner added another layer to the puzzle. "How many of these are here? In these binders?" 

"How many what are here?" Clark stood there, arms crossed, a look of. . . _was it a scowl?_ "Mind telling me what's going on?"

"The CIA lab wasn't **the end**. . . ," she pointed to the files in Cam's hands. "The files here match the remains we examined there."


	100. Lament

**Lament**

At 2:06 that morning, they got the call. By 2:23, they'd rolled their son under a rainforest tent in Christine's room and by 2:57 they were at the lab, reunited with the Unholy Three who looked nothing like traitors, just bleary-eyed researchers. By 3:02, Angie had already primed the largest scanner in the lab to help finish off the two dozen binders still untouched by the team.

At 3:03, he suggested his first conspiracy theory.

"The government killed these people in a secret research program. . . ."

It took no time for Cam to roll her eyes and for Wendell to groan as undercover-FBI-agent Genny Shaw looked to Clark for help.

As they wheeled a cart piled with binders from the office, he pressed his point.

"You've been locked up, threatened and made to pay penance to the same government. . . ."

The last word trailed off since he'd lost his audience.

Except one.

He tried again. "This could be part of the Phoenix Initiative, a top-secret plan by the government to relocate former collaborators by giving them the identities of dead Iranians. . . .

She stood on the wrong side of her former desk, leafing through one of the last binders and saying nothing. He had expected the classic Brennanism: _a scientist does not speculate but uses empirical evidence to draw conclusions_.

Yet she remained eerily silent as he threw out more theories— _the victims were part of a secret society. . . they were to be an elite squad of super soldiers. . . ._

"I'd bet that Stires is up to his neck in this."

The gasp startled him.

"Dr. B?"

She turned toward him, pain radiating, and he realized that her silence had been but a silent **lament** for her former mentor.


	101. Crucify

**Crucify**

Looking past his steepled fingers, he tried to set his agenda in his first department head meeting. "We're in a position to expand the public's perception of what we do in a positive way that will only enhance the Jeffersonian's reputation as a premiere institution."

Yes, he was laying it on thick, but the eyes on him, the slight tilt of bodies forward—even Dr. Hanberry who had already touted the 'fine work of Cam Saroyan'—and wasn't letting the moment pass.

"The Jeffersonian should be the first place people think of as a resource in science, especially forensic sciences." He caught the eyes of each of his listeners. "In the past, the Medico-Legal Lab was held in check by the ego of its forensic anthropologist, a very capable woman, but one who lacked the empathy to really relate to the living."

A few nods around the table told him he'd struck a rich vein. He expanded his view, outlined the changes in the lab that would make it the standard in forensics. "We can expand the program, make it the premiere forensic lab with specialized instruction for police forces and graduate degree programs that can establish the Jeffersonian as the finest teaching lab in the country."

"It already is."

Dr. Clark Edison, stood at the doorway of the conference room, a folder in hand, his tie at halfmast.

"I meant no disrespect to the fine work the lab has been able to accomplish over the years." He made sure to gesture with his palms up. "But it's time to forego fragile egos, Dr. Edison. Tempe. . . Dr. Brennan wanted to control everything and she could never trust others to do the field work. Am I right?"

He held Edison's eyes and smiled. "I'm not here to **crucify** her."


	102. Deaf

**Deaf**

Cam sank into the latest of unfamiliar beds, thankful that this one, at least, belonged to someone she knew and before she. . . .

Waking from a leaden sleep came in turtle steps. Awareness seeped into her consciousness taking its time before she willingly opened her eyes.

The room which had once been too bright now lay in shadows and she let her eyelids droop. . . .

She woke to a sharp baby's cry. Sitting up, her surroundings reminded her that she was still far from home. Pulling herself from the embrace of the bed, she swung her feet down and padded toward the bathroom. After a long hot shower she made her way toward the center of the house.

Wendell greeted her with a smile and the offer of coffee. Brennan sat at the couch, a laptop on the coffee table, her attention centered on Little Hank. "Angela sent the scans over and Dr. B pulled out all of odd files while you and I crashed." He pointed to the computer. "Hodgins is convinced the position of the files in each of the binders has meaning, but. . . ." He shrugged. Last night they'd been mostly **deaf** to wild conspiracy theories.

She sipped her coffee and settled in as Wendell began to scramble eggs. Brennan, the mother, was always interesting to watch as she could never quite divorce herself from Brennan, the scientist.

Nodding toward Brennan, she drew Wendell's attention to the woman reading a book to her baby. The image was at once charming and disarming as Hank fell into an easy sleep and the restless mind of Brennan was drawn back to the laptop.

And the scientist took over.

"Hodgins said these might be file numbers. But I think I know what they are."


	103. Cliff

**Cliff**

He followed Stires out of the meeting and addressed the man's back. "You can't possibly believe that Dr. Brennan did anything to soil the reputation of the Jeffersonian or the lab."

He'd walked in a dream state late to the meeting only to come upon the nightmare of Dr. Stires denigrating Dr. Brennan to what appeared to be a willing audience.

Stires turned. "So being removed from the lab by government agents meant nothing."

Maybe it was too little sleep over the last few days, maybe it was too much smugness from Stires, but he walked off the **cliff** he usually stayed clear of.

"So the pupil exceeds the teacher and you can't handle it."

Stires visibly flinched at the slight before regaining his footing. "I don't think you fully understood my proposal, Dr. Edison." He stepped closer. "I plan on doing more than just maintaining the status quo at the lab. The Jeffersonian is a national institution. I intend to take the lab to a new level. Make it truly great again."

"By franchising the lab? Dr. Stires' Drive-Thru Forensic Lab? Three tables, no waiting?" He was really winding up. "I've got your slogan, 'You stab 'em, we slab 'em.'"

Clark stepped closer. "You can't appreciate someone having a different take on a case or someone being better than you are. Are you so thin-skinned or so narcissistic that you need to insult others in order to make yourself feel better? Neither Cam nor Temperance would stoop to that level of childish behavior because both of them are competent, secure, highly intelligent scientists who aren't threatened by someone's prowess. They make the people around them better by being in the lab."

Stires was about to say something, but he didn't want to hear it.

"The lab is already great."


	104. Engage

**Engage**

They're deep in a dark cyber alley with no turning back. The screen shifted producing one more roadblock before they'd be in. "Give me the first number."

Brennan read the first numbers. But the screen remained static, mocking their first attempt.

But all they needed was a puzzle to engage Hodgins or Brennan and neither would give up..

"These numbers are sequential and none of the pages were in the right order were they?" Hodgins had signed onto Brennan's theory and wasn't about to let an opportunity to peek inside a government file go to waste. "What order would you put them in?"

It took Brennan only a second to re-order the numbers from memory to open

Pandora's box within a government database.

"Our first victim was Tamir Fadil, an Iraqi killed by a roadside bomb outside of the green zone."

"He would be the seventh body we examined."

Angela flipped the page.

"Who the hell is this?"

Tamir Fadil shared a file with Mahmahd Ibrahim.

"According to this, he died from wounds sustained in an explosion." She turned to Brennan. "Is he one of yours?"

Her friend shook her head. "Wait." Brennan had that look. "Can you put their photos side by side?"

The two men could have been related.

"Try the next one," suggested Hodgins.

This file revealed the third body Brennan and the others had examined. And the photos?

"They could be brothers," she said.

"That just might have been the point," Hodgins offered.

They ran through all of the files uncovering more pairs of doppelgangers until they came upon the last and she couldn't help but quip, "Twin sons of different mothers."

"That's biologically impossible."

"That's the title of an album, sweetie." But Brennan had that look that said that she understood something all too well.


	105. Float

**Float**

The place had the cookie-cutter feel of a national chain including the daily inspiration chalked in above the door: "What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?"

Danny Beck saw where he was looking and tried to defend his choice of eatery. "They have great cranberry orange muffins and fair trade coffee." He split open his muffin to make his point. "Healthy food that's politically aware."

He ignored the health talk and slid the jump drive Angela had put together across the too plastic table.

"A present, Booth?" He studied the drive. "Or am I going to end up like Alexander Litvinenko?"

"Something you lost and we found."

A tic just above his right eye told him he'd captured the man's attention.

"I haven't lost anything."

The drive sat between them. "So you weren't having Bones and Cam recreate the files you lo. . . ."

He didn't have to finish his sentence as Danny grabbed the drive and pocketed it.

"They were holding out on me."

Booth waited a beat. "Yes. But even they didn't have everything that's on that drive."

"Well, I hate to eat and run." Danny sketched the picture of a man making a retreat, but Booth brought out his second gift that put Beck back in his seat.

"Eric Meehan."

Danny could hide his reactions with the best of them, but Booth wasn't fooled.

"Guy's dead. Bus crash."

"Car accident."

"My bad," said Danny, "car accident." His expression was all-CIA neutral. He picked up his coffee. "Kind of weak, Booth. We deal with the living. We lose interest in dead forensic anthropologists."

"Then how much would you bet that he's not dead?"

Hodgins had suggested he **float** the idea and he watched as Danny practically choked on his politically-aware coffee.


	106. Blizzard

**Blizzard**

"I don't know what that means."

Brennan was being, well, Brennan, and he just wasn't buying it. She'd been the one to insist that the order of pages was a file number or code of some kind. She'd been the one to suggest a CIA database, been the one who had studied the files to determine what she and Cam and Wendell had already worked on and what was brand new.

And now she was pulling back.

So he was pushing forward. "You know exactly what this means."

One dead man paired with another dead man that could be a, well, dead ringer for the other and something just wasn't right. Brennan knew which of the pair was most certainly dead, but the other?

"He's taking the place of the dead man. He's living another person's life."

Looking toward Angela, he could see he wasn't going to get any kind of help from her. When the **blizzard** of emotions started to overwhelm Brennan, she knew how to gently shovel through the storm and help Brennan see through it all, but right now Angela was idling her engine.

"C'mon, Dr. B, you know that if these files hold information about two men that could be brothers, and one of them is dead, it stands to reason that the other man is living out the dead man's life."

"It's perfect. A coroner or a forensic scientist verifies the death of the second man and he can have a new life in minutes."

"Why, Jack?" asked Angela. "Why do this?"

He glanced at Brennan.

"Let's say that man number 2 assisted the US and needs to get out of Iraq or Afghanistan rather than be labeled a collaborator. He's matched up with dead man and assumes his identity. And no one's the wiser."


	107. Stoic

**Stoic**

Seeley Booth could have been one of the very best company men, he thought, as they sat in that damned coffee shop with their damned over-priced coffees on the table talking about something— _someone_ —which should have been dead and buried a hell of a long time ago.

Okay, Booth was doing most of the talking, had a hell of a lot of information he shouldn't have had.

"Your wife spreading out into spy novels now?"

Booth waited a beat before leaning in and spelling it out. "Let's say that a certain company has friends they need to protect so they find a doppelganger who's died and switch identities. Let's say the doctor who helped them by IDing victims as potential matches started to branch out for himself. Sell get out of jail cards to the highest bidder in a place where he had a lot of dead bodies to choose from."

John Le Carre, he thought, might be able to do it justice.

"I'm not sure, Booth, but hasn't someone written something like that before? I'd hate to think that Temperance was stealing plots now."

Booth did what people who had the upper hand do and he leaned back, looked positively like that Cheshire cat. He decided to go down the rabbit hole.

"Don't misunderstand, Booth, she's a fine novelist, but switching genres is tough."

"Someone tries to take him out, but he fakes his own death." Booth knew too much. "You need the best to sort it out."

So it wasn't as elegant as a Le Carre novel. Nor as secretive as it should have been.

"I'm sure the public is willing to read any Temperance Brennan novel."

"Who's to say he's not offering the same service here."

He chose to say nothing, a **stoic** to the end.


	108. Wants

**Wants**

His very first hangover wasn't anything at all like this. Then he had had to hide the after-effects from his grandfather and had been able to ascribe the symptoms to the flu that was going around. Now, he wanted to hide the pounding headache from lack of sleep in one of the crates just outside his office and ship it. . . hell, he'd ship it to Dr. Stires if only to have the echoes of their conversation stop reverberating in his head.

"Dr. Edison?"

He peeled his face from the cradle of his arms to cast an eye on a white lab coat.

"Yes?"

"Dr. Stires **wants** theglabalcodificatoryfricasselambhocks as soon as possible."

He had to ask the lab coat to repeat himself twice before he understood the request. Even then, his ears seemed to betray him.

"We're designated to use that equipment for as long as needed on our research project," he said, but it came out as a groan. "In fact, Dr. Stires endorsed our use over his unless he needed it in the event of a special case."

White coat said nothing, simply repeated the request and indicated that Dr. Stires needed it for inventory purposes.

"It's here," he said, his head exploding into a million shards of repressed anger. "You can read the inventory numbers and take as many photos of the machine as you wish, but we are currently using it and will be using it in the foreseeable future."

The man's face went white like his coat. The demeanor cracked, but he didn't much care.

"Our two labs share equipment and work hand-in-hand when necessary." Somehow he'd risen to his feet. "If Dr. Stires needed the. . ." his head was still like cotton ". . . equipment he'd have it within the hour."


	109. Steal

**Steal**

"And just how long are you planning on keeping this little charade going?"

If Caroline Julian was anything, she was direct and he'd learned the best way to deal with her was to be just as direct.

"I'm not sure."

That earned him the official Caroline Julian stink eye and harrumph.

"What do you expect to accomplish by playing chicken with the CIA, cher?"

"Danny had a reason for pulling Bones and the others out of the lab the way he did and Stires has something to do with the files we found in the lab."

Caroline gave him another look. "Are you sure this isn't about a little thing between your wife and the good looking doctor?"

"The past is the past, Caroline."

That earned him an arched eyebrow. "Danny gave you nothing. You know nothing. So how long are the brainiacs playing Big Brother at your house?"

"Don't know."

The prosecutor was shaking her head.

" _Not sure, don't know."_ Every answer he could give her was based more on instinct than on hard evidence. Under her watch, he couldn't even **steal** a glance without being caught. "Good looks and charm only take you so far, cher."

"Stires used a coding system in his files when he worked digs to keep the authorities from finding out what he knew. He arranged the files in such a way as to hid the evidence. Bones knew it was him immediately."

"And Bones believes he's involved with Meehan."

" _Believes?_ That woman is an atheist unless she can see, touch, smell, hear or taste it."

"Exactly."

It wasn't his best argument; yet, it was.

"She knows Meehan's work. She was a grad student with him and figured out his involvement by kerf marks on the bones.

"You should have started with that, cher."


	110. Adored

**Adored**

He woke to the feeling that something was wrong.

Instinct made him listen to the sounds of the house, the sump pump turning on, the rush of air through the ductwork as the air kicked on, the sounds beneath that, those from the rooms down the hall—Christine's yellow palace and Hank's green frog of a room, and the rooms that held their guests.

But all he heard from them was nothing.

Instinctively his hand reached out for his **adored** , but found the sheets cool to the touch.

Pulling himself from the bed, he made the rounds of the rooms, checking in on his son and daughter before making his way toward the front of the house and the living room where he saw Bones bathed in a halo of light, an open book on her lap, her eyes looking at something beyond the pages.

"Bones?"

Startled, she looked at him with doe eyes, bright and wide that took a second too long to focus.

"Are your cricket dance moves still off?"

"Circadian rhythms, Booth." She closed the book. "And no."

He slid in beside her. For a woman whose mind outpaced the fastest Indy cars, understanding her heart often came up short.

"If Stires is involved. . . ."

"I have no evidence, but I'm sure he is involved, Booth."

That admission did not seem to ease her troubled mind. "Do you still care about him?"

He hated the question, hated that he had to ask. But she hadn't been herself since coming back from the midnight scavenger hunt at the lab.

"No." She sighed. "It's just that I feel responsible for all of this."

"Well, if you're responsible, so am I, Bones. We both quit our jobs, we. . . ."

"No, Booth."

"Switching bodies was my idea."


	111. Threat

**Threat**

"Once upon a time?"

"No, Booth," she corrected him, "it didn't start out that way. It started with. . . . _The fog of war hung over the battlefield: a mixture of gunpowder and cordite and dust and smoke and the grimy remnants of soldiers whose fighting colors were obscured by mud and sweat and blood."_

"That's quite a sentence, Bones." 

"War is horrible _as you know_." The last words were an apology of sorts for a man who had seen war first-hand. "I wrote about a forensic anthropologist who switches a man's identity to save him from the **threat** of the battlefield."

"How would Eric Meehan know the story?"

She sighed. "It was published when I was in graduate school. Eric was very much taken with the story when Michael showed it to him."

She cannot read her husband's expression, but she knew how much he disliked her former mentor. Her own feelings were laced with reminders of how he had tried to discredit her on the witness stand. She cannot remain objective.

"You were working on three doctorates in college and you have time to write a short story?"

He was teasing her, trying to change her mood, but she felt the weight of providing the seed for someone to abuse.

"Look, Bones, I think Eric was working for the government and whatever he's done is on them. Danny didn't provide details, but I think he needed you and Cam to verify Eric's work."

"You know, Booth, the only reason to do that is if Eric did something that he shouldn't have done. He also wanted to protect Cam and Wendell."

Booth's silence underscored what she already feared. "Look, Bones, you aren't responsible for what this asshat did or didn't do."

But words alone don't erase the guilt.


	112. Answer

**Answer**

"This man needs to be dead."

Ignoring the explosiveness of that statement, he paused long enough to force Eric to hold the tablet just a bit longer than he had meant to before he took it.

The tablet glowed in the dimness of the parking garage and he took one look at the image before giving his **answer**.

"No."

That drew a slight smile from Eric.

"You call yourself a scientist?" The tone was teasing with an edge. "A second's glance and you've decided that's that?"

He exhaled then looked down on the face again. At 70, the man had been in the press for decades, a businessman with a penchant for beautiful women and homes whose latest deal had earned him notoriety if not infamy.

"He'd have to offer a million or more to make this happen." He extended his arm and placed the tablet within Eric's reach. "They'll be a firestorm of press coverage of this man's death. It's far too risky."

"I can give you 5 million reasons why we should do this."

There'd been a movie on cable one evening—a grainy film in which one character said something similar and it had started a chain of events that had ended badly. Then it had been a million reasons—a number far beyond his reach until now.

"No."

"Again with the no." Eric's expression did not change. "You think you can't do this, can't switch files, can't keep this on the down low. . . ."

He had to laugh. Eric's prodding had been done before and he held the tablet out again. "It's not going to work this time."

Eric shrugged. "Even if I said this were merely a down payment? The man _is_ a billionaire."

"Or if I said you'll be richer than Tempe?"


	113. Slave

**Slave**

"No."

That one word had power when she ran the lab. Simple, direct, she stood a 99% chance that the person she was speaking to would obey that simple, two letter word without question.

"No," she repeated. And for emphasis, she provided the only argument she had. "I don't do undercover."

"I bet Arastoo. . . ."

She skewered Wendell with a look she reserved for the 99% and stopped him cold.

"NO."

And _no_ should have meant _no_ , but she was trying to say no to the 1%.

"If someone is using the lab to do the. . . ," Brennan looked at Booth who nodded once, "the _old switcheroo_ , then that person needs a coroner to sign the death certificate to legitimatize their actions."

"I bet Danny pulled the three of you in because he suspected something going on in the lab." Booth's eyes never left hers. "He set it up so you and Wendell could go back in with a chip on your shoulders, a perfect cover for what we need."

 _Damn_.

She tried again. "I don't think I'd be very effective. What about an intern?"

It wasn't that she didn't want to be released from what was essentially house arrest at Booth and Brennan's home, but she wasn't sur]e she could keep up the pretext at the lab once she discovered who was behind the. . . _the old switcheroo_.

"There's something else for you to consider." Brennan, a **slave** to details, had been studying all of the cases at the lab since Stires had been there. "We discovered a pattern of 3 cases in which Michael worked alone."

"And each one of those victims were involved in something illegal," Booth added.

"And for each of them," Brennan looked pained, "you signed the death certificate."


	114. Whirl

**Whirl**

At 4:36 a.m. the body appeared in the headlights of an overnight truck pulled off the road to allow the driver an unauthorized leak in the weeds along the highway. By 4:57 a.m. the call from the Jeffersonian woke him from a very pleasant dream of Egyptian rooms and hidden cameras and lovemaking. By 5:18 a.m. he had kissed his wife and son before pulling his Mini out of the garage and into traffic that had yet to fully waken.

By 6:10 a.m. he was on the scene, collecting insects and particulates powered by sips of coffee, the **whirl** of activity at the site growing with the gathering light. By 6:17 a.m. Agent James Aubrey arrived to examine the scene. One minute later as the sun broke past the horizon, Dr. Cam Saroyan appeared.

Despite the circumstances, despite being hip-deep in a ditch of muck and human goo, he couldn't help but grin.

"Welcome back, Cam."

His greeting earned a nod as his former boss peered into the ditch. The dispatcher had prepared her as she gingerly joined him, her waders covering her well past her hips.

"If you're here, then Dr. B must be close behind."

She gave him a look for an answer.

"Wendell?"

She shrugged. "Today's your kind of day," she told him as she settled into the ditch.

It took a microsecond to understand. "Shared journeys, parting of the ways, why behind the who, who did the what." He stowed a vial into an evidence bag. "Then there's the non-evidence in the evidence binders."

For minute, they shared a look before focusing on the remains. Each worked in silence examining the body for almost a half hour before being interrupted by the arrival of Dr. Michael Stires.

At 7:03 a.m., to his mind, Stires' downfall began.


	115. Fanatic

**Fanatic**

"Ange?"

The silence from the artist was. . . unnerving. _Maybe_. She wasn't sure. She felt. . . _impatience_ , yes. Anything beyond that was. . . .

"Sweetie, you've got to give me a moment. I have to do this under the radar."

She let her breath out between her teeth and waited. Beside her Hank burbled as he put together his jigsaw puzzle on the floor. Booth was at the FBI while Christine had been handed off to her grandfather who had disappeared with her into the backyard.

"I'm back." She saw the brick wall of Angela's office before her best friend reappeared. "I'm still checking." She heard an indistinct voice before the image went black.

She waited.

Hank had almost half of the 32-piece puzzle together, methodically building it from the borders in.

"Bren!"

Her name in a sharp whisper drew her back to the laptop.

"They brought in a new body this morning." Angela's face came back into focus. "I'm looking for a bank on the coast?"

"No. A mechanical bank. A coasting bank, child on sled. Made by J. and E. . . . ."

"I'm searching now." Angela's eyes narrowed. "Is this something Booth would like?"

"Maybe. The last time it sold, it went for over a quarter of a million dollars."

"And you think Benton Kellogg might. . . ."

Her screen changed to an image of the bank, a small child at the top of a triangle, ready to take the plunge down the ramp.

"They had a public showing of the bank at an art gallery in California. Kellogg probably attended since he was a **fanatic** collector of mechanical banks. This is the only one known in existence."

"Booth says that people don't change."

"So he might be in the security footage."


	116. Ocean

**Ocean**

"Leave it to Dr. Brennan to find the one drop in the **ocean** that is Benton Kellogg, cher."

Kellogg's appearance had changed substantially from his obituary photo—thinner, blonder, younger looking—but Bones had seen past that to see a skeleton that did not lie.

"And we're sure this is the cretin who stole $17 million from his family trust?"

Bones was never wrong. "We're circulating his photo to all the agencies and shops that deal with antique banks."

"But we're going to do something more to separate the drop from the deep blue sea." He handed Caroline a photo. "We're going to put that in a shop to sell and see if we can smoke him out."

"Girl skipping rope."

He couldn't read Caroline's expression. "This is going to do that?"

"There's only 30 known examples of it. But if that doesn't do it, we've got this one, and this one."

He set the other photos on his desk and watched as Caroline bent her head and squinted at them.

"This one," he pointed to the football players, "is called 'Calamity' because once the lever is pressed the two players collide." He caught Caroline smiling. "And this one is called 'Picture Gallery.'"

"Looks more like the little man is in a jail cell," she said. "I sense a theme here, cher."

The poetry in the lures fed his gut which told him they were on the right track.

"That first bank?" Caroline's smile was almost feral. "I understand from Aubrey that the child goes coasting down the slope and lands on its head."

"Our very hope for Kellogg."

Caroline stepped toward him and put a finger on his chest.

"Don't think all this cuteness means the case is over."

"You have a whole lot more work to do, Booth."


	117. Jobless

**Jobless**

" _I need this job."_

The mantra playing in his head couldn't crowd out the **answer** he knew as if it were his own heartbeat.

"The victim suffered from oestochrondritis dissecans as evidenced by the loosening of the bone near the joint and by the pockmarked. . . ."

Dr. Michael Stires had been putting him through his paces, making him earn back his job in the lab, but the questions hadn't been challenging, hadn't been anything like those he'd endured under Dr. Brennan. The pelvic bone was riddled with holes, was extremely brittle and too obvious even if the condition was rare.

"You got all that from your initial examination of the bone, Mr. Bray?"

The man had the same manner as Dr. B of addressing him with the _mister_ in front of his last name, but coming from Stires, he found it somehow offensive.

"Yeah," he said, his tone strained. "Look, I don't know what I'm doing auditioning for a job that I had before the feds decided to use me for target practice." He began to remove his gloves, Booth's instructions gone silent. "I need this job, I need the money, but I don't need the aggravation." He set his gloves on the table and began to unbutton his lab coat.

Stires held up his hand. "I had to know."

He knew just how important it was to get back into the lab, but he was tired of the trials.

"Why do I need to keep proving myself?"

The words came out as a low growl.

"You're pretty angry, Mr. Bray."

"Well, wouldn't you be if your mentor make you **jobless** and poor?"

He hadn't rehearsed the words, hadn't even thought them, but they came out just the same.

"Maybe I can help you. . . Wendell."


	118. Ill manners

**Ill manners**

In some ways crime boards reminded him of seventh grade science and Mr. Merwick who required posters detailing things like frog dissection or osmosis. While he didn't know how much science was in their boards, he had to hand it to the scientists who had unearthed most of what they already knew.

"Not one of these guys is a boy scout," he said, "they have that in common. Let's take a look at all of their associates. They might have helped them into another life."

The agent at his elbow nodded and wrote something on his notepad.

"We need to look into how these men contacted the people who doctored the records, so let's look into phone records, social media, correspondence and so on."

Another note, another thread to pull.

"We should look into the money, how they hid it before their break."

"We're assuming these guys aren't dead, Agent Aubrey?" The newly-graduated agent had the **ill manners** of a puppy. "I mean, the Jeffersonian has a good reputation and Saroyan did sign off on three of these men."

"Shouldn't we be looking at her as well?"

If Booth were here and heard _that_ he might slap down the eagerness of the agent with the equivalent of a verbal rolled-up newspaper.

" _Dr_. Camille Saroyan is one reason why the Jeffersonian doesn't make mistakes," he countered, "but in this case, she was lied to."

"And what about this Bray? And Brennan?" 

He paused and tried not to skewer the agent with a look. "Like _Dr_. Saroyan," he said slowly, "Wendell Bray is on the inside assisting us in the investigation. That's not to leave this room."

"What about Brennan? She did get swept up in. . . ."

He stopped the query in its tracks.

" _Dr_. Brennan's our secret weapon."


	119. Compromise

**Compromise**

As they flew over the Mississippi, he reached across the armrest and took her hand. With a squeeze of her hand, he hoped to bring her back to first class.

"I'm sorry, Bones."

"It was better not to bring the children." Her jaw shifted, but she remained caught up in the endless clouds outside her window.

"I meant Stires." He swallowed, then repeated himself. "I'm sorry about Stires."

He expected to see that little-girl-lost look that signaled her hurt. But with Stires, the hurt was different.

Her silence was _different_.

He continued to hold her hand, grounding her to their life even as they were flying to the coast to find a man who should be dead.

Over the Colorado Rockies, she spoke again.

"Michael once said there should never **compromise** scholarship or we compromise ourselves."

"Spoken like a true nerd, Bones." He meant to tease her back to the present.

"Four years ago I was part of a peer review panel that rejected a paper Michael submitted for publication." Her jaw clenched, them relaxed. "We felt that the research wasn't strong enough."

"Two months later, a paper was submitted in which he was co-author with one of his graduate students." Her voice had a whispery quality. "The graduate student's name was first."

"You've done that with your squinterns, Bones." He squeezed her hand. "That's what good teachers do."

"I called the paper's author before we left." She sighed. "She said that Michael's name should never have been a part of the paper, but she relented because he was, as she said, 'fighting for his academic life.'"

"He's compromised, Booth." She inhaled. "And it may be worse. . . ."

He finished her thought. ". . . Because we don't know how they're getting the bodies to replace these men."


	120. Sting

**Sting**

The cool amber of the tequila belied the burn of the liquid as it hit the back of her throat.

"Here."

Stires pushed the plate with the wedges of lime toward her and she took one to cut the sharpness of the liquor.

"Are you sure you don't want something else?"

She shook her head and relished how numb the tequila was making her. The odd tension at the lab was becoming a distant memory. She closed her eyes for a moment, but when she opened them, Michael Stires was still sitting across from her.

He smiled. "I know I pushed, but I think it important for us to have a chance to talk outside the lab."

" _You're the boss."_

She hadn't meant to say that, hadn't even meant to give it that tone. "Look, I didn't. . . ."

"You're resentful, Cam. May I call you, Cam?"

She must have nodded because he continued.

"You were running one of the best labs in the country and then that. . . I don't even know what _that_ was, and you're back, but you're no longer in charge and that's got to **sting**."

She inhaled through her mouth, the tequila haze lifting.

"I've reached out to board members and requested that they re-instate you as head of the lab." He looked over his drink. "I did just about everything short of resigning. . . ."

 _He's good,_ she thought. A semblance of caring, a story of trying to help. But all she could see was a man selling second chances to the highest bidder under the auspices of the Jeffersonian's reputation with her name endorsing his fraud.

She leaned in to play her part. "You and I both know why I can't be in charge under the circumstances."

" _You're_ the boss."


	121. Complete

**Complete**

So often in cases like these, it was a waiting game.

Booth had insisted that they act as Tony and Roxy, purveyors of toys from the turn-of-the-century, the rarer the better.

The real owners of the toys—"Girl skipping rope," "Calamity" and "Picture Gallery" as well as the other dozen or so they'd gleaned for the assignment—had agreed to the deception, assured that the banks would never leave their sight and while she had wanted to argue that she couldn't be expected to watch the cast-iron mechanicals at every moment, Booth had promised them their **complete** vigilance as well as a signed copies of her latest novel.

He said it was a small price to pay.

Part of the price of finding Benton Kellogg was being confined to their booth, greeting potential buyers, answering the same questions _ad infinitum. . ._ an exaggeration, of course.

And part of the price was watching Booth playing Tony and not hiding he loved this assignment if only for the toys.

"Roxy," he said in his drawl, "did you see that Hubley Popeye on a motorcycle in the next booth?" He turned to her and smiled, Booth leaking through, "complete with spinach cart?"

"Hank would love that," he said as he practically drooled. "They don't make 'em like that anymore."

"Because cast iron toys are not practical and are extremely heavy for a little boy," she countered.

His enthusiasm never waned as he began singing to her, his arms swinging in time with the tune, "'I'm one tough Gazookus, which hates all Palookas. . . ."

"Shh, Tony," she interrupted, "you know we just moved. . . ." She stopped herself, a face in the crowd of antique buyers looking far too familiar.

"Tony," she nodded toward the crowd, "we might have a buyer."

oOo

 **Author's note:** The complete Popeye lyrics can be found here content/song/popeye_the_sailor_ and the Popeye and spinach cart is here search?q=original+hubley+popeye+spinach+cart&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiY1tebxtfTAhUn34MKHb8fAkoQ_AUICygC&biw=1703&bih=856.

took the previous chapter, "Sting", but may not have sent out any notifications for some reason.

One of my many jobs has me in very close proximity to some of the toys and banks that are mentioned in the story. The first mass-produced toys in the US were cast iron banks meant to teach kids thrift. Those that survived metal drives and time and abandonment and abuse are worth lots of money these days compared to what they originally went for. To the person who PM'd me, I'm simply using the knowledge gained from a few years of dealing with these. I'm not an authority, but I like the idea of something like an antique being part of a trap.


	122. Drop

**Drop**

He followed the directions exactly, pastwhat-once-was toward what-shouldn't-be to the little hole-in-the-wall bar bordering an industrial park.

The placed smelled of stale beer and despair where sins were discussed in coded language in the shadows broken only by fading neon.

"The bastard's got to go big."

He'd barely slid into his seat when Eric made the pronouncement, the esses in the one word elongating, coming out like the hissing of a snake.

"What the hell does that mean?" he whispered to his former student.

"The man's a showboat, a narcissist. He wants to count the number of people who show up at his funeral." Eric took another swig of beer. "He wants a big showy death befitting a man of his stature."

He could look past the three beer bottles between him and Eric, but he couldn't look beyond the implication.

"It's too risky." He held Eric's eyes. "That will need the entire team at the lab and if there's one thing wrong with the records, or an intern sees something in the bones, or if. . . ."

"Don't you think I know that?" Eric's voice had the edge of a knife. "If I could **drop** the bastard, I would."

There were at least five million reasons not to lose the man as a client, but a big, showy death only focused more attention their way. At least Eric was in agreement.

"The tightwad's willing to spend millions to create garish palaces, but he's not willing to spend on the people who make him what he is."

"Who he's _going to be_ ," he corrected Eric. "He'll be free and clear as long as he's done what you've told him to do."

"But he doesn't listen," Eric countered, his eyes glassy. "He just does what he damn well pleases."


	123. Pass

**Pass**

The jingle in his pocket fed the mechanicals in their booth. The cast iron wonders fired, tumbled, twirled, exploded and jumped up at the command of a single penny.

And he was loving it.

Months ago he was imparting wisdom to wide-eyed kids looking to find a purpose and here he was, a wide-eyed kid having re-discovered his own.

Yes, he was keeping an eye on Kellogg as the other hobbyists gathered around their booth, Roxy providing an encyclopedia of information that was nothing short of amazing.

"This is sometimes referred to as 'Round the World' but the name in the 1898 catalog was. . . ."

He half-listened to her, half-let his inner child play, half-watched their target.

Okay, so his math sucked.

"Hey, Tony, you want to show this good looking-guy what that one does?"

The guy was on the dark side of 80 and one of the many looky-loos.

"Hey, Roxy, you got another guy already?"

The "good-looking guy" smiled broadly at their patter.

"You two remind me of me and my late wife, Gladys."

He set down the bank. Kellogg was still standing near the booth. "If she was anything like my Roxy, you two must have been something."

Pulling a coin from his pocket, he set it in the rifle . With a push of a button, the coin jumped from the hunter's gun to a hole in the tree causing the stump to pop open for a very surprised bear.

The old man smiled. "I couldn't **pass** up seeing that again."

He turned over the bank. "This hunter always hits his mark."

Speaking of marks, he looked around for his. Kellogg was leaning in toward Roxy, their conversation low and intimate.

A wink from his wife told him they, too, would hit their mark.


	124. Tremor

**Tremor**

Even if he had a gallon of coffee, it wouldn't have woken him as surely as the ride leading to the latest site. The transition from paved road to an improvised one sent up a **tremor** within the van that turned into an unrelenting quake that threatened to make them all do more than just spill their coffees.

Their driver, a tech from the lab called in at this late hour— _early hour?—_ never slowed the van until they came to a line of emergency vehicles washing the night with a cacophony of red and yellow and blue lights.

He practically fell out of the van with Hodgins in tow, both of them wobbly from their ride in.

Along a broad field, plumes of smoke and steam added an other-worldliness to the scene. Shards of twisted metal rose up out of the darkness like trees and shrubs, jagged reminders of what had fallen from the sky.

His first breath was almost as hard as the landscape.

"Jet fuel," Hodgins said as he handed him a respirator from his kit. The bug man listed half a dozen chemical compounds in the air that made little impression on him at that early hour, but he donned his mask anyway.

The field was populated by other creatures clad in respirators and jumpsuits, silently examining the remains of the jet that had crashed there.

It only added to the eeriness of the site.

He practically jumped when he felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to find Cam beckoning to him to follow. They walked a narrow path to what had once been the cockpit of the plane.

She took off her mask for a moment. "I have a feeling about this one, Wendell."

Caged by a tangle of metal were two burnt remains.


	125. Faded

**Faded**

"Just focus on the work."

That had been the advice to any graduate student who had gone green digging through gravesites. An ulna with leathery flesh. The bones of a child. A skull still wet with putrefaction.

"Just focus."

The POLICE letters in front of him bobbed and dodged with the uneven ground.

"Dr. Stires?"

He turned toward the voice. This NTSB joined the trek to the site. "Have you confirmed his identity?" he asked.

She shook her head. "No, we've only confirmed that the Cessna belongs to him." She hop-stepped over a rut and he followed. "We'll wait on a positive ID from your team."

Part of his team had taken up an area around what appeared to be a portion of the cockpit, Jeffersonian blue melding with the federal hue. Markers dotted the ground around the twisted metal.

His guide pointed her chin toward his mask. "We've been especially cautious. Report had it that the plane came down in a fireball."

"In-flight explosion?" he asked as he pulled up his mask.

"Possibly." She paused. "We're sweeping for explosive residue."

"He had enemies."

Her NTSB **faded** into the gloom.

This was the grand death their client had paid for, but two dead? Was another life so worthless? Or worth so much?

"Focus," he reminded himself. "Focus."

He followed the marked path to his team, not even glancing at the two burnt corpses.

Beyond lay a sliver of fuselage stabbing the earth. Bray and Saroyan crouched over, each pantomiming their actions before peeling off debris.

 _Only one person was to be at the heart of this. One dead. Only one._

He tried to clear his mind, but the nightmare grew darker.

They another layer away to reveal the owner of the Cessna, a man who wasn't supposed to be dead.


End file.
